A Brief History of the Jonestown Massacre

Jim Jones was a complex man. A sideburned communist and occasional Methodist minister, fond of tinted glasses, he founded his own pseudo-church in Indianapolis in the late 1950s, the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church, known in short as the Peoples Temple. While Jones called it a church, it was more like his version of a Marxist commune, with a smattering of Christian references thrown into his charismatic sermons. The Peoples Temple demanded serious dedication (and financial support) from its members, most of whom were people of color in the church’s early days, and many were all too happy to support Jones’s message or racial harmony, especially at a time when segregation and discrimination were ubiquitous across the U.S.

Jones and his wife Marceline, who were white, were strongly in favor of racial integration, and they adopted several children from different racial backgrounds. The Joneses were the first white family in Indiana to adopt a Black American boy, and also adopted three Korean American children, a Native American child, and a handful of white kids. (They also had one biological child.) Jones called his adopted retinue the “rainbow family,” a metaphor for his own view for the world, and he made a name for himself desegregating various institutions in Indiana.

1. The Road to Jonestown
2. The Massacre
3. Don’t Drink the Flavor Aid

The Road to Jonestown

As the Peoples Temple grew throughout the 1960s, Jones’s sermons became much more dystopian. He began to preach about an impending nuclear apocalypse (which, during the Cold War, may not have seemed that unusual). He even specified a date for annihilation—July 15, 1967—and suggested that afterwards, a socialist paradise would exist on Earth. Jones selected the remote town of Redwood Valley, California, for that new Eden, and moved the Peoples Temple and its members there in 1965.

In the following years, Jones abandoned all pretenses of established Christian teaching and revealed himself to be an atheist with demagogic tendencies. “Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment—socialism,” he said. His followers embraced the idea of restarting civilization with utopian ideals, free of racism and capitalist strictures.

As media scrutiny increased and his public profile got more complicated, Jones became concerned that the Peoples Temple’s tax-exempt status as a church in the U.S. would eventually be revoked. He was also paranoid about the U.S. intelligence community surveilling his activities. So, in 1977, Jones again moved the Temple and about 1000 of his followers, this time to a settlement he had been building since 1974 in the South American nation of Guyana. He named it Jonestown.

Occupying nearly 4000 acres of jungle, Jonestown had poor soil and limited fresh water, making agriculture difficult. The commune was overcrowded, hot, and buggy, and Temple members were forced to work long hours to keep the organization running. Jones figured his people could farm the land in this new utopia. Though Jones was wealthy, he did not share (or even use) his assets to make life in Jonestown easier. Jones himself lived in a small shared house with few luxuries.

The Massacre

While Jones’s followers were homesteading in Guyana, their relatives in the U.S. were becoming increasingly concerned about their loved ones’ whereabouts and lack of communication. Some felt that Jones was holding his followers captive in an abusive situation or had brainwashed them. The relatives asked Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat representing California’s 11th District, to investigate reports of alleged human rights violations and other legal issues related to Jonestown.

Ryan led a delegation to Jonestown in November 1978. He was accompanied by his aide Jackie Speier, NBC News correspondent Don Harris, various other members of the media, and concerned family members of Jonestown residents. While visiting Jonestown, Ryan met a more than a dozen Temple members who wanted to leave (including a couple who passed a note, reading “Please help us get out of Jonestown,” to Harris, mistaking him for Ryan).

While processing paperwork to help Temple members return to the U.S., Ryan was attacked by knife-wielding Temple member Don Sly, but the would-be assassin was restrained before he could injure Ryan. Eventually, the entire Ryan party, plus the group of Jonestown defectors, were escorted by Jones’s armed “Red Brigade” foot soldiers, to drove to a nearby airstrip. As the delegation boarded planes to leave the compound, the Red Brigade opened fire, killing Ryan, one Temple defector, and three members of the media. Eleven others were injured, including Speier (who later served in Congress from 2007 to 2023). Those who survived fled into the jungle.

When the shooters returned to Jonestown and reported their actions, Jones promptly called a “White Night” meeting, inviting all Temple members. But this wasn’t the first White Night. On various occasions prior to the murders, Jones had hosted White Night meetings in which he suggested that U.S. intelligence agencies would soon attack Jonestown; he had even staged fake attackers around Jonestown to add an air of pseudo-realism to the proceedings. Jones intimated that Jonestown was being invaded and offered Temple members these choices: stay and fight the imaginary invaders, head for the USSR or the surrounding jungle, or engage in “revolutionary suicide” (taking their lives as an act of political protest).

On previous occasions when Temple members mock-voted for the third choice, Jones tested them: Members were given small cups of liquid purportedly containing poison, and were asked to drink it. They did. After a while, Jones revealed that the liquid didn’t contain poison—but that one day it would.

On the final White Night, Jones was not testing his Temple followers. He was killing them all.

Don’t Drink the Flavor Aid

Jim Jones had been stockpiling cyanide and scores of other drugs for years prior to the fateful night. Now, he ordered his followers to create a fruity beverage containing cyanide, diazepam, promethazine, chloral hydrate, and Flavor Aid, a grape-flavored powder similar to Kool-Aid.

Jones urged Temple members to take their lives to make a political point. Debate ensued. An alternate plan put forth by member Christine Miller involved flying people to the USSR, but Jones prevailed after repeatedly telling his followers that Congressman Ryan was dead, and that would bring the authorities soon. Jones insisted that mothers squirt poison into the mouths of their children using syringes. As their children died, the mothers were dosed from cups of the fruity drink. The victims wandered onto the grounds and eventually fell dead—900 in all, including more than 300 children. Only a handful of members who happened to be away on errands or playing basketball escaped the carnage.

Jones, his wife, and other members of the Temple left wills stating that their assets should go to the Communist Party of the USSR. Jones himself did not drink poison; he died from a gunshot to the head, though it’s not clear whether it was self-inflicted. Toxicology reports found high levels of barbiturates in his blood. Jones was reportedly hooked on a variety of substances, possibly the cause of his increasingly erratic behavior over the decades.

But nothing could adequately explain Jim Jones’s hold over his followers, or decipher their decision to end their lives, or alleviate the tragedy for their loved ones.

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A version of this story was published in 2012; it has been updated for 2025.