The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

But thanks to the arrival of many former Laurel Street Tabernacle members and Jones’s own skill at recruitment on the revival circuit, the Peoples Temple congregation now skewed white. These members were drawn not through commitment to integration or socialism, but because they admired Jones’s healing gifts and Bible-based preaching. Most Peoples Temple whites came from the same working class that opposed the civil rights movement. Some, like Jack and Rheaviana Beam, genuinely embraced Jones’s emphasis on civil rights, but until he could bring his other white followers around to the same viewpoint, Jones had to bind them to him by pulpit showmanship and his own personal example.