page_title: Jim Jones
section_title: Racial integrationist
hierarchical_section_title: Jim Jones / Founding of the Peoples Temple / Racial integrationist
caption_attribution_description: English: January 1977 photo by Nancy Wong.Reverend Jim Jones (left) is given the Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award at Glide Memorial Church, 330 Ellis Street by Reverend Cecil Williams (right) in San Francisco, California.
context_page_description: James Warren Jones was an American preacher, civil rights activist, and faith healer turned cult leader who conspired with his inner circle to direct a mass murder-suicide of his followers in his jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana. He launched the Peoples Temple in Indiana during the 1950s.
  Rev. Jones was ordained in 1957 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ. He moved his congregation to California in 1965 and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the 1970s. He then left the United States, bringing many members to a Guyana jungle commune called Jonestown.
  In 1978, media reports surfaced of human-rights abuses in the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune to investigate. While boarding a return flight with some former cult members who had wished to leave, Ryan was assassinated and four others were murdered by gunfire. Jones then ordered and likely coerced a mass suicide and mass murder of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, almost all by cyanide-poisoned Flavor Aid.
context_section_description: The New York Times reported that, in 1953:
  [D]eclaring that he was outraged at what he perceived as racial discrimination in his white congregation, Mr. Jones established his own church and pointedly opened it to all ethnic groups. To raise money, he imported monkeys and sold them door to door as pets.
  In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the local Human Rights Commission. Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, however, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs. The mayor and other commissioners asked him to curtail his public actions, but he resisted. He was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and then climaxed with, "Let my people go!"
  During this time, Jones also helped to racially integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the Indianapolis Police Department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital. Swastikas were painted on the homes of two black families, and Jones walked through the neighborhood comforting local black people and counseling white families not to move. He set up sting operations to catch restaurants refusing to serve black customers and wrote to American Nazi leaders, passing their responses to the media. He was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, but refused to be moved; he began to make the beds and empty the bedpans of black patients. Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.
  Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views. Likewise, white-owned businesses and locals were critical of him. A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call. Other incidents occurred, but one could theorize that Jones himself was involved in at least some of them.
caption: Jones receives a Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award from Pastor Cecil Williams, 1977
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