The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Fully a third of Jonestown’s population was pensioners, almost all of them black, who were attracted to the Temple by Jones’s promises to care for them well in their old age. Their earlier lives had been a struggle. When Jones warned in the pavilion of sudden Klan expansion, or the U.S. government building concentration camps, they remembered well burning crosses and white sheriffs with fire hoses and snarling dogs. What Jones described was only a step or two beyond what they’d personally experienced, and so they believed what he told them.