The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Then, sometime in early 1954, Somerset made the decision for him. Jones and Marceline would say later that he was dismissed because of his efforts to bring blacks into the congregation. That’s unlikely—Jones would have faced a near-impossible task in recruiting African Americans to Somerset because few blacks lived anywhere near the church. A quarter century later, when FBI investigators probed Jones’s personal history, they interviewed a former Somerset member who testified that the unpaid student pastor was asked to leave when members “accused him of lying and stealing funds.” That aspersion is also dubious. Jones had no access to Somerset’s money, and whatever he raised from his outside preaching belonged to him and not the church. But clearly, things had reached a point where both sides were ready to separate, and Jim Jones left Somerset Methodist to establish a church of his own.