In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope. They sought to create a truly egalitarian society. The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. Her own experiences at an oppressive reform school in the Dominican Republic, detailed in her unforgettable debut memoir Jesus Land, gave her unusual insight into this story. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audiotapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there. Tommy Bogue, a teen, hated Jones’s church, but was forced to attend services-and move to Jonestown-because his parents were members.Ī Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told before. Edith Roller, a well-educated white progressive, joined Peoples Temple because she wanted to help the less fortunate.
Others, like Hyacinth Thrash and her sister Zipporah, were dazzled by his claims of being a faith healer-Hyacinth believed Jones had healed a cancerous tumor in her breast. Some, such as eighteen-year-old Stanley Clayton, appreciated Jones’s message of racial equality and empowering the dispossessed. These people joined Jones’s church for vastly different reasons. Government decided to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.Ī Thousand Lives follows the experiences of five Peoples Temple members who went to Jonestown: a middle-class English teacher from Colorado, an elderly African American woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, a troubled young black man from Oakland, and a working-class father and his teenage son. By the time Jones relocated the Peoples Temple a final time to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. Even as Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers found it increasingly difficult to pull away from the church. After Jones moved his church to Northern California in 1965, he became a major player in Northern California politics he provided vital support in electing friendly political candidates to office, and they in turn offered him a protective shield that kept stories of abuse and fraud out of the papers. He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a church in Indianapolis called Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church. The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown
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