"than submit to what they consider an intolerable oppression sometimes become the focus of a heroic myth. Such mass suicides might also win the grudging respect of the victors. On the other hand, the act of people resorting to mass suicide without being threatened - especially, when driven to this step by a charismatic religious leader, for reasons which often seem obscure - tends to be regarded far more negatively. On November 18, 1978, 918 Americans died in Peoples Temple–related incidents, including 909 members of the Temple, led by Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana. The dead included 276 children. A"
"Peoples Temple The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, commonly shortened to Peoples Temple, was a new religious movement founded in 1955 by Jim Jones in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jones used the Peoples Temple to spread a message that combined elements of Christianity with communist and socialist ideas, as well as an emphasis on racial equality. The Peoples Temple is best known for the events of November 18, 1978 in Guyana, when 918 people died in a mass murder at its remote settlement, named ""Jonestown"", as well as the murders of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his visiting"
"drum, an organ, and a bed of daisies growing where the bodies once lay. Mass suicides: Jonestown The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name ""Jonestown"", was a remote settlement established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of reverend Jim Jones, in north Guyana. It became internationally known when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 people died in the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, and at a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana's capital city. The name of the settlement became synonymous with the incidents at those locations. In"
"Jim Jones James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American religious cult leader who, along with his inner circle, initiated and was responsible for a mass suicide and mass murder in Jonestown, Guyana. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple cult which he began in Indiana during the 1950s. He was officially ordained in 1956 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ. He moved the Temple to California in 1965 and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the early 1970s. He then"
"Jonestown The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name ""Jonestown"", was a remote settlement established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of reverend Jim Jones, in north Guyana. It became internationally known when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 people died in the settlement, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, and at a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana's capital city. The name of the settlement became synonymous with the incidents at those locations. In total, 909 individuals died in Jonestown, all but two from apparent cyanide poisoning, in an event"
"Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones. When Jones decided to move his congregation to Jonestown, Guyana, Dymally ""wrote the Guyanese prime minister to reassure him that Jones was an upstanding citizen."" The Jonestown compound would be the site of the mass suicide of over 900 people on November 18, 1978. In the 1990s Dymally served as a paid lobbyist for the country of Mauritania, attempting to present the country as engaged in abolishing every remnant of slavery. Dymally came out of retirement and returned to the California State Assembly in 2002 when Assemblyman Carl Washington was term limited. He served for"
"observance of their religion in order to free them from the suppositious ""shackles"" of their ""unenlightened"" and ""primitive condition."" Out of thousands of religious groups, a handful have become associated with acts of violence. This includes the Peoples Temple founded by Jim Jones in 1955, which ended in a murder/suicide claiming the lives of 918 people in November, 1978 in Guyana. (See main article: Peoples Temple.) Members of the Peoples Temple who did ""not"" die in the murder/suicide are examples of ""cult survivors,"" and the cult survivor meme has become a popular one. Tabloids such as Britain's ""Daily Mail"" often"
"Jon (Kimo) and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, both died during the events at Jonestown. Jim Jones James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American religious cult leader who, along with his inner circle, initiated and was responsible for a mass suicide and mass murder in Jonestown, Guyana. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple cult which he began in Indiana during the 1950s. He was officially ordained in 1956 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ. He moved the Temple to California in"
"the People's Temple as he was boarding an airplane in Port Kaituma to return to Georgetown. Fearing further publicity, Jones and more than 900 of his followers died in a massive communal murder and suicide. The November 1978 Jonestown massacre suddenly put the Burnham government under intense foreign scrutiny, especially from the United States. Investigations into the massacre led to allegations that the Guyanese government had links to the fanatical cult. Although the bloody memory of Jonestown faded, Guyanese politics experienced a violent year in 1979. Some of this violence was directed against the WPA, which had emerged as a"
"R. Wilson argues against that view by pointing out that only five such events have occurred in similar religious groups: the Branch Davidians, Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven's Gate. At the end of 1978, the Temple declared bankruptcy, and its assets went into receivership. In light of lawsuits, on December 4, 1978, Charles Garry, the corporation's attorney, petitioned to dissolve Peoples Temple. The petition was granted in San Francisco Superior Court in January 1979. A few Temple members remained in Guyana through May 1979 to wrap up the movement's affairs, then returned to the U.S. The Temple's buildings in"
"Peoples Temple in San Francisco The Peoples Temple, the organization at the center of the Jonestown incident, was headquartered in San Francisco, California, from the early to mid-1970s until the Temple's move to Guyana. While the Temple originated in Indiana in the 1950s, after leader Jim Jones predicted an apocalypse that would create a socialist Eden on earth, it moved to Redwood Valley, California in the late 1960s. Its headquarters later moved into San Francisco, where Jones remained until July 1977, when Jones fled with almost 1,000 Temple members to Jonestown, Guyana following investigations by local media. The Peoples Temple"
"member Paula Adams engaged in a romantic relationship with Guyana's Ambassador to the United States, Laurence ""Bonny"" Mann. Adams later married Mann. On October 24, 1983, Mann fatally shot both Adams and the couple's child, and then fatally shot himself. Defecting member Harold Cordell lost 20 family members the evening of the poisonings. The Bogues family, which had also defected, lost their daughter Marilee (age 18), while defector Vernon Gosney lost his son Mark (age 5). The mass suicide of the Peoples Temple has helped embed in the public mind the idea that all New Religious Movements are destructive. Bryan"
"mostly by older women who become nuns. Some people join NRMs and practice celibacy as a rite of passage in order to move beyond previous sexual problems or bad experiences. Groups that promote celibacy require a strong recruitment drive to survive; the Shakers established orphanages to bring new individuals into their community. Violent incidents involving NRMs are extremely rare and unusual. In those cases where large number of casualties resulted, the new religion in question was led by a charismatic leader. Beginning in 1978 with the deaths of 913 members of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana by both murder"
"a utopian agricultural community near Port Kaituma in western Guyana. The People's Temple of Christ was regarded by members of the Guyanese government as a model agricultural community that shared its vision of settling the hinterland and its view of cooperative socialism. The fact that the People's Temple was well equipped with openly flaunted weapons hinted that the community had the approval of members of the PNC's inner circle. Complaints of abuse by leaders of the cult prompted United States congressman Leo Ryan to fly to Guyana to investigate. The San Francisco-area representative was shot and killed by members of"
"sex. Notably, Mother S. A. Divine fought an attempt by Jim Jones, the head of Peoples Temple, to take over the movement in 1971. Jones based some of his doctrines on the International Peace Mission movement, and claimed to be the reincarnation of Father Divine. The two battled for years, with Divine sending spies into Jones' Peoples Temple and Jones doing the same to the Peace Mission. Converts to the Peoples Temple wrote Mother Divine trying to convince her that Jones was Father Divine until the infamous mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Mother Divine died on March 4,"
"East Berlin leading the U.S. delegation to the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. In the mid-1970s, Jim Jones, who developed the cult Peoples Temple, initiated friendships with progressive leaders in the San Francisco area including Dennis Banks of the American Indian Movement AIM and Davis. On September 10, 1977, 14 months before the Temple's mass murder-suicide, Davis spoke via amateur radio telephone ""patch"" to members of his Peoples Temple living in Jonestown in Guyana. In her statement during the ""Six Day Siege"", she expressed support for the People's Temple anti-racism efforts and told members there was a conspiracy"
"the largest such event in modern history and resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until September 11, 2001. The Peoples Temple was formed in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1955. Though its roots and teachings shared more with biblical church and Christian revival movements than with Marxism, it purported to practice what it called ""apostolic socialism"". In doing so, the Temple preached that ""those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism."" In the early 1960s, Jones visited Guyana – then a British colony – while"
"2008 by Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the November 2015 Paris attacks in November 2015 by ISIL. Certain cults, especially religious cults, have committed a number of mass killings and mass murder-suicides. These include Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, where 919 people died in 1978; the Order of the Solar Temple in Canada, Switzerland, and France, where 75 died in 1994, 1995, and 1997; Shoko Asahara's Aum Shinrikyo, which killed 12 in Tokyo, Japan, in 1995; Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate in San Diego, California, where 39 died in 1997; and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God"
"TAC's philosophy of sending in the decoy drones first to protect the manned jammers and fighter planes to follow.' Gene Juberg's field report concluded, stating that all objectives of the meet were met with unqualified success from the performance of the AQM-34V. The 432nd Tactical Drone Squadron, under the command of Col. James Witzel, was recognized by top TAC generals and commended for a job well done."" Following the mass suicides by members of the Peoples Temple, a cult led by Jim Jones, at Jonestown in Guyana on 18 November 1978, CH-53 helicopters of the 55th ARRSq were utilized to"
"relocated to Guyana. In 1978, media reports surfaced that human rights abuses were taking place in the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation into the commune to investigate what was going on; Ryan and others were murdered by gunfire while boarding a return flight with defectors. Jones subsequently committed a mass murder-suicide of 918 of his followers, 304 of whom were children, almost all by cyanide poisoning via Flavor Aid. Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in a rural area of Crete, Indiana to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and"
"later served as a judge of the Supreme Court of Guyana. Part of his courtroom technique is reported in Fred Archer's biography of Sir Lionel Luckhoo: He also came to notoriety as the legal personal representative of the Reverend Jim Jones. Jones was the founder and leader of the People's Temple Church, and had left California in the 1970s to establish a commune in Guyana known as Jonestown. A dispute arose between Jones and two former members, Timothy Stoen and Grace Stoen. The Stoens alleged that Jones was holding their child, John Victor Stoen, in the commune. Jones maintained he"
"Jones of the Peoples Temple. He was Jones' personal physician and published his church's newspaper. In November 1978, Jones committed suicide in Guyana with more than 900 followers. Goodlett later said, ""You don't need glasses for hindsight. Everybody is running like hell away from Jim Jones now, but none of us knew at the time."" When he became incapacitated from Parkinson's disease, he continued dictating or writing many of the paper's editorials, holding political meetings in the office, and guiding the direction of his newspapers. ""The black tail is never going to wag the white dog,"" he once said, ""But"
"which 909 members of the Peoples Temple, an American religious group led by Jim Jones, ended their lives by drinking grape Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and various prescription drugs. Thousands of Japanese civilians took their own lives in the last days of the Battle of Saipan in 1944, some jumping from ""Suicide Cliff"" and ""Banzai Cliff"". The 1981 Irish hunger strikes, led by Bobby Sands, resulted in 10 deaths. The cause of death was recorded by the coroner as ""starvation, self-imposed"" rather than suicide; this was modified to simply ""starvation"" on the death certificates after protest from the dead"
"School. Mitchell and his family were members of the Reverend Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, and they followed Jones — without Mitchell — in 1977 to Jonestown in Guyana. Mitchell lost both of his parents, four sisters and a brother in the mass murder-suicide that took place at Jonestown on November 18, 1978. According to Mitchell's fiancée, 29-year-old Marylou Hill, who would also join the Peoples Temple, he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. Mitchell returned to the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he was raised. He lived with his fiancée, Hill, in a two-story, white Victorian house at"
"famous attorney in the ML King case and Don Freed the other famous author in the Kennedy case have come up with regarding activities planned against us—Peoples Temple."" Another Temple member, Carolyn Layton, wrote that Freed told them that ""anything this dragged A month later, on November 18, 1978, over 900 Temple members committed mass suicide in Jonestown, while Congressman Leo Ryan, NBC reporter Don Harris and others were murdered at a nearby airstrip. Jones created fear among members by stating that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were conspiring with ""capitalist pigs"" to destroy Jonestown and harm its members."
"Jones and stating that the leader of those attempting to extricate relatives from Jonestown was telling ""bold-faced lies"". In 1974, the Peoples Temple signed a lease to rent land in Guyana. The community created on this property was called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, or, informally, ""Jonestown"". It had as few as 50 residents in early 1977. Jones saw Jonestown as both a ""socialist paradise"" and a ""sanctuary"" from media scrutiny that had started with the Kinsolving articles. Former Temple member Tim Carter said the Temple moved to Jonestown because ""in '74, what we saw in the United States was"
"Liberation and Democracy. On 25 December 1977, a WPVP newspaper called ""The Beacon"" and edited by Brindley Benn published an exposé of the People's Temple group which had established a compound called Jonestown in Guyana. The article repeated allegations by disaffected former members of the People's Temple which had been published in an American magazine called ""New West"". A few days later, public relations people working for People's Temple founder Jim Jones visited Benn and insisted that he retract his criticism, saying ""they were surprised by an attack coming from a comrade in socialism."" Benn refused, and wrote another story"
"the Temple's Georgetown, Guyana headquarters. The Stoens' later opposition, including leadership in a group called the ""Concerned Relatives"", would become a significant reason for the investigation by Congressman Leo Ryan and the final demise of the Temple at Jonestown. The Temple frequently saw itself as the target of conspiracies by government agencies and others, and included these conspiracies in its literature. For example, in November 1976, Unita Blackwell, a Mississippi mayor and civil rights activist, spoke at the Geary Boulevard Temple about her trip to China with Shirley MacLaine. Two men caught eavesdropping at the front door quickly fled in"
"Timothy Stoen Timothy Oliver Stoen (born January 16, 1938) is an American attorney best known for his central role as a member of the Peoples Temple, and as an opponent of the group during a multi-year custody battle over his six-year-old son, John. Stoen's battle led to an investigation of the Peoples Temple's settlement at Jonestown, Guyana, which became internationally notorious in 1978 after 918 people—including Stoen's son—died in the settlement and on a nearby airstrip. Stoen continues to work as a deputy district attorney in Mendocino County, California, where he is assigned to the District Attorney's Fort Bragg office."
"West"" piece, editor Rosalie Wright telephoned Jones to read him the article. Wright explained that she was only doing so before publication because of ""all the support letters we received on your behalf, from the Governor of California (Jerry Brown)"" and others. While still on the phone listening to the allegations contained in the article, Jones wrote a note to Temple members in the room with him that said, ""We leave tonight. Notify Georgetown (Guyana)."" After Jones left for Guyana, he encouraged Temple members to follow him there. The population grew to over 900 people by late 1978. Those who"
"broke of the mass deaths of members of Peoples Temple in Jonestown. Prior to the group's move to Guyana, Peoples Temple had been based in San Francisco, so most of the dead were recent Bay Area residents, including Leo Ryan, the United States Congressman who was murdered in the incident. The city was plunged into mourning, and the issue of White's vacant Board of Supervisors seat was pushed aside for several days. Moscone ultimately decided to appoint Don Horanzy, a more liberal federal housing official, rather than reappoint White. On November 27, 1978, the day Moscone was set to formally"
"WA for KXLY-TV. The family lived in Woodland Hills, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Don Harris (journalist) Don Harris (September 8, 1936 – November 18, 1978) was an NBC News correspondent who was killed after departing Jonestown, an agricultural commune owned by the Peoples Temple in Guyana. Harris and four others were killed by gunfire by Temple members at a nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana. Their murders preceded the death of 909 Temple members in Jonestown and four Temple members in Georgetown, Guyana. Harris, whose real name was Roy Darwin Humphrey, was born near Vidalia, Georgia. In 1957,"
"the Peoples Temple. While covering the Nicaraguan Revolution, he was struck but unharmed by a government soldier's rifle in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979. Naythons' profession as a photographer led him to become active in the places he visited. In response to the Cambodian refugee crisis he witnessed first-hand in 1979, Naythons founded and led International Medical Teams (IMT), a mobile team of physicians, nurses and paramedics that brought health care across the Thai border into Cambodia from 1979 to 1981. In 1989 Naythons worked with Phillip Moffitt and Rick Smolan to publish ""The Power to Heal"" In 1991, Naythons founded"