The Temple began as a church in the Pentecostal-Holiness tradition in Indianapolis in the 1950s. The problems with Jonestown are self-evident.īut that single event shouldn’t define the movement. This, in turn, led the Special Collections Department at San Diego State University to develop the Peoples Temple Collection.
REDWOOD GOSPEL MISSION NEW LIFE PROGRAM ARCHIVE
The impulse to learn the whole story prompted my husband, Fielding McGehee, and me to create the website Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple in 1998 – a large digital archive documenting the movement primarily in its own words through documents, reports and audiotapes. 18, 1978 doesn’t tell the complete story of my own family’s involvement – neither what happened in the years leading up to that dreadful day, nor the four decades that followed. It is a disservice to the lives, labors and aspirations of those who died to simply focus on their deaths. We lose sight of a significant social movement that mobilized thousands of activists to change the world in ways small and large, from offering legal services to people too poor to afford a lawyer, to campaigning against apartheid. They might highlight the dangers of cults or the hazards of blind obedience.īut by fixating on the tragedy – and on the Jones of Jonestown – we miss the larger story of the Temple.
In the more than 40 years since the tragedy, most stories, books, films and scholarship have tended to focus on the leader of Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, and the community that his followers attempted to carve out of the dense jungles of northwest Guyana. Photojournalist David Hume Kennerly’s aerial photograph of a landscape of brightly clothed lifeless bodies captures the magnitude of the disaster of that day. 18, 1978, more than 900 men, women and children died, including my two sisters, Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore, and my nephew, Kimo Prokes.
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