In Search of a Promised Land: Peoples Temple and the Legacy of The Great Migration

Why did they go? What were they looking for? How did they get the courage to leave all they ever knew for a place they had never seen, the will to be more than the South said they had a right to be? Was it a braver thing to stay, or was it a braver thing to go?

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

For members of Peoples Temple, life in the Temple meant life continually on the move. From the Temple’s humble beginnings as a small, multi racial church congregation defying the segregation of 1950s Indianapolis, Pastor Jim Jones would lead his followers through a series of major upheavals, beginning with the few dozen members who made the move with him to the Redwood Valley in Northern California. The church expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, establishing facilities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, before the final migration of the majority of the Temple’s members to Guyana in 1977, where most of them would die the following year. Jim Jones seemed to be driven by a continual urge to escape his current woes, to seek an idealised future somewhere else.

When Jim Jones filled his congregation with dreams of Guyana, where Temple members would form a Utopian agricultural community, free of the crime, endemic racism and political turmoil of the United States, for many Temple members the notion of uprooting their lives and moving thousands of miles in the hope of a better future, free from bigotry and discrimination, was nothing new. For most of the Black members of Peoples Temple – who made up the majority of Temple membership – their lives had been deeply impacted by the Great Migration, either by joining the migration themselves or as the children and grandchildren of those who had made the journey. They knew exactly what it meant to leave all they had ever known for a place they had never seen in search of a better life.

The mass exodus of African Americans from the U.S. South to cities in the North, and later, the West Coast which came to be known as the Great Migration, one of the most important and least recognised events in American history.  During the approximate time frame from 1910 to 1970, six million Black people left the South, escaping the oppression of the Jim Crow race laws and limited economic prospects for improved employment options and the hope of freedom from institutionalised racism.

The Great Migration represents one of the largest voluntary movements of people in history. The Great Migration is a story of the sins of a nation never fully addressed, the story of massive social movements. It is the story of a people determined they would not let that sin dominate their lives, they would no longer bear the shame that was never theirs and above all the stories of six million individuals who left the South, stories of fear and sorrow, determination, hope, and courage – sometimes all at once. 

The Great Migration is also part of the story of Peoples Temple. In the years before the Temple moved to California, they were proceeded by hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South who moved to California for the job opportunities generated by the defence industry boom created in response to World War Two and the Cold War. Population numbers from Los Angeles tell the story;  the African American population of Los Angeles grew from 15,000 in 1920 to around 62,000 by 1940 but then increased at at astonishing pace, with 200,000 African Americans arriving in the city between 1942 and 1945 seeking work in aviation, steel and ship building, an increase from less than 3% of the city’s population in 1920 to to over 15% even as the population of LA as a whole rapidly increased in this period.

Despite the often improved economic opportunities, California was not the promised land of sun, sea, and the American dream for many of the Black people who made the Great Migration. The promise of new lands may have meant an escape from institutionalised racism but covert racism was prevalent, jobs at times elusive, housing crowded and substandard. The new residents were separated from their traditional support structures of faith and family, heartbroken at the separation from those they left behind, and facing restrictive housing practices that limited where they could reside – condensing the African American population of Los Angeles into areas such as Watts and Compton, far from the jobs they came for, with limited transit and poor infrastructure. Migrants also faced increased, and intrusive, police surveillance with the Los Angeles PD which was particularly known for its harassment and brutality towards Latino and African American neighbourhoods.

Tensions between African American residents and the LAPD reached boiling point with the Watts Uprising of 1965, when an altercation between police officers and an African American man pulled over for allegedly drink driving led to days of violence when some community members alleged the police attacked the driver as well as kicking a pregnant woman at the scene. Over the next five days, some 30,000 people were alleged to have participated in the unrest, including rioting, looting, assault, arson and protests; hundreds of buildings were damaged or destroyed, and 34 people were killed.

For people who had made the Great Migration, and their children and grandchildren, the elusive dream they chased often ended with disconnect, poverty, lives all but trapped in neighbourhoods that were increasingly plagued by drugs, violence, and the rise of criminal gangs.

****

Into all this stepped Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple movement. Here was a preacher, a white man (although he claimed native American ancestry, a claim researcher has been able to substantiate) who lead a largely black church, who understood their plight, who said to them “yes, you have been so very wronged but come with me, join me in this fight, we will together fight for a better world”. For African Americans in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Jim Jones offered them empowerment, not platitudes; not exhortations to focus on the reward of the afterlife but a real fight to make life in this world better, more just.

Jim Jones was very aware of the traditions of Black Christianity, and the importance of religion to African Americans, incorporating many of these spiritual practices into Temple services.  But the Black members of Peoples Temple were not naive folk taken in by a demagogue they followed to their eventual deaths. Having taken the impossibly brave step of crossing the country for a better life, they were not people who would surrender their will to a leader white leader who promised he had the answers if they shut up and obeyed; they were joining a political movement to fight for all of them. And for their children, often confused, struggling with their identity, racism and street crime, the tightly monitored Temple activities for teens gave their kids a safe outlet where they too could be part of the movement away from the risks of drugs and gangs they faced in their own neighbourhoods. The Temple was heavily involved in ministry work in the inner cities, offering assistance with housing, with dealing with government bureaucracy and the legal system, drug and alcohol detoxification programs.

Above all, what people found in Jim Jones was someone who was aware of their plight, aware of the desperate conditions elderly African American Temple (some of whom were the children of freed slaves) members had faced in the South, and who cared, who listened. Members were invited to share their stories; Jones recounted the story of a Temple member describing her experiences as a field worker in the South, with her white overseer physically abusing her and the woman’s husband furious but unable to react in the knowledge the overseer would kill them both:

Yes. So I told him back there. I said you hurt me. I said you remind me of that (voice breaking) man in the States, uh, when I went in the cotton field that morning at seven o’clock. I said he cussed me for a black son-of-a-bitch, he told me to no never come to the goddamn field this goddamn late no more. And I told him, well, I had my little children to take care of, and uh, I had to put clothes on and feed them. He said you black son-of-a-bitch, don’t you never come to this goddamn field this late no more. To him it’s just a flick right in my face and I looked down to (unintelligible word), and my husband just throw his hands up and he just– had legs like this ‘cause he knew he shot me. If he woulda said anything, he woulda blowed his brains out, and mine too. See? And that hurt me and he (sobbing) and he cussed at me more like dirt. As hard as I work. I started work– I worked from seven o’clock to nine o’clock at night.

Peoples Temple offered something for everyone, and the experience of a white preacher who knew, who cared, who got angry on their behalf and wanted to take up the fight together, was something new and alluring for many Temple members. Churches at the time were heavily segregated; Martin Luther King Jr in 1960 describing 11am Sunday morning as one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America. Jim Jones’s hatred of racism was genuine; from the earliest days of his church Jones insisted that church memberships and seating would be integrated, although it’s important to note that the inner circles of Temple leadership were always overwhelmingly white.

The majority of Temple membership was Black, and we can infer from the numbers how many of those Black members were part of the Great Migration. Of the approximately 1000 residents of Jonestown, including the 909 who died on November 18, 1978, and the 87 who survived (including those at the Temple’s office in Georgetown and a group who left earlier that day), 691, or 69.2% were black. 325 of those people were from the American South, people who made their way to California and eventually joined the Temple there; so 47% of Blacks in Jonestown, 32.5% of residents overall, were part of the Great Migration. These numbers only tell part of the story, however. Peoples Temple was a Black church, but also also a family church; most Temple members were part of often tightly interconnected family groups. In addition to Black Temple members originally from the American South, there were many more members born in California to people from the South, the children and grandchildren of parents who were strong, resourceful, determined to seek a better life and sought it in Peoples Temple, forming a second and third generation of Temple members affected by the Great Migration.

Jones was no doubt aware of this legacy of displacement. Did it figure into his plans to migrate to Guyana? Did he see that most of his people were familiar with uprooting their lives to escape racism in search of something better and would do it again? We cannot know, but African Americans often expressed their views of the Great Migration in biblical terms; Jones knew that for his Black followers, California had not been the promised land they sought. He now offered them a real Utopia, the community Peoples Temple was building in Guyana, which offered once and for all an escape from the grind of systemic racism, the poverty and crime of the ghettos. He spoke of Jonestown in idyllic terms; Temple members would work together building a commune in the jungle where everything was owned in common, a jungle paradise of freedom and natural beauty. This would be their Promised Land, this was the dream.

Temple members who left California to live in Guyana truly expected to live in a paradise on Earth. They didn’t go to die there, and had no idea that it would end in mass tragedy. For Temple members who had made the Great Migration from the South to California and not found the good life there, they had every reason to believe that in Jonestown, they would find peace at last. These were brave and resourceful people, willing to leave all they had ever known and travel to a place they had never been to secure a better future for themselves and their families. But just as their decision to leave for the Promised Land did not end in peace and prosperity in California, there would be no happy ending in Guyana. People who had all their lives determined to decide for themselves how they would live found themselves, finally, out of choices.

References