Editor’s note: Josh Edwards is the managing editor of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas. This original of this editorial, which was published on November 19, 2024, appears here, and is reprinted on this site with permission.
Author’s note: A version of this column ran Nov. 18, 2018, on the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre. Around 30 people from Deep East Texas died in Jonestown, Guyana. This column is dedicated in their memory.
Jim Jones still has the world fooled nearly 50 years later.
The master manipulator’s transformation from Christian pastor to cult leader reached a violent climax Nov. 18, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, yet almost every detail etched in our nation’s historical memory about Jones is wrong.
Jones promised his followers utopia, a place where all God’s children, regardless of race, could live in harmony. He gave them death instead.
Forty-six years ago this week, more than 900 people died surrounded by vats of poisoned Flavor Aid. In his last act of brainwashing, Jones wanted the world to believe this wave of death was a mass suicide.
It wasn’t. The people of Jonestown were murdered.
The dead that day included 117 Texans — among them around 30 people from Timpson, Lufkin, Center, Alto, Palestine, Jasper, Henderson and Tyler. The total of Texans dead at Jonestown is eclipsed only by those from California, where Jones moved The Peoples Temple after his ministry went off the rails in Indiana.
Jones called his final plan “revolutionary suicide.” That was a lie, as were most words that came from his mouth.
“You had three choices. Either you drank the stuff or you got injected with it or you got shot. Pick, but one of those three you’re going to do,” Jonestown survivor Herbert Newell, a native of Sharkey County, Mississippi, told me in 2014. “It wasn’t like everybody was agreeing to do this.”
Escape through the dangerous jungle was out of the question for most. Newell survived because he was on a mission gathering firewood.
Survivor Tim Carter has told the same stories of people shot or injected with poison. So did the Catholic nuns who helped clean up the aftermath. The FBI files contain photos of stacks of used syringes piled on tables and near bodies.
“I’m sure those that were forcibly injected with poison would be aghast and shocked to hear that they were ‘ready to die,’ and that their struggle to live has become instead an icon for meekly surrendering,” Carter wrote in a 2006 essay.
The audio tapes Jones left behind corroborate these horrors.
Jones recorded almost everything, including the last hours at Jonestown. Listening to audio from that day is gut-wrenching. Children wail as they are lined up to be executed. In that line were twins Alfred and Alfreda March and their sister, Anita. Their mother, Ernestine, was from Lufkin.
Parents, perhaps Ernestine March herself, refused to feed their children poison. People began to choke and scream.
Jones told them they had no choice. His guards had just killed Sen. Leo Ryan of California. America was about to invade, Jones said, again lying.
“Don’t be afraid to die … if these people land out here, they’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people, they’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this,” Jones tells his followers.
Some on the tape thanked Jones and pledged their allegiance. But, even they were murdered.
Jones began his career as a preacher in Indian. His initial message of how the Gospel was for all regardless of race resounded widely with African Americans like Luberta “Birdie” Arnold.
Arnold was born in Timpson in 1907 and became a nurse. She joined Jones in Guyana in 1977. She used her medical skills to care for the elderly, despite her own advanced age.
Jones’ message of hope also did wonders for Black women like Nancy Clay of Henderson. The Peoples Temple taught her how to read when no one else would.
But soon, talk of Jesus was stripped from Jones’ sermons, which were peppered with wild ideas about communism and declarations that he was the only savior.
“If you want me to be your brother, I’ll be your brother. If you want me to be your father, I’ll be your father. If you want me to be your God, I’ll be your God,” one of the surviving Peoples Temple members recalled Jones saying during a sermon.
The move away from Jesus didn’t seem to bother some.
“Had we been in church and reading our Bible, we would have known that this was not something Christianlike or of God,” Newell told me in 2014.
We’ll never know exactly how Pearl Land of Alto or Margrette Jeffery of Center felt about Jones’ later preaching. Members of the Peoples Temple weren’t allowed to show their true feelings.
Jones used classic brainwashing tactics to turn his followers against one another. His congregation was largely made up of disenfranchised people, mostly African-Americans from the South. Many of the Californians who joined were southern transplants.
Jones meticulously isolated his followers from their families.
Clay, the Henderson native, joined the Peoples Temple with her granddaughter and great-grandson. None of her children nor her husband joined. Neither did any family members of Lexie Smith Davis of Jasper.
The congregation was told Jones’ path was the only way to salvation. Members of the Peoples Temple were encouraged to turn in others who broke the rules. Violators were beaten in front of the entire community.
These are the same tactics that despots used to come to power on grand scales — Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, communist Cuba and China.
Yet, at the end, Jones didn’t have complete control. Christine Miller, a former county clerk born in Brownsville, stood up to oppose him.
“I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith,” she says, following it later with, “I look at all the babies, and I think they deserve to live.”
Everyone forced to poison themselves, shot to death or shot up with cyanide that day deserved to live. Those children should still be with us today.
Carter, who fled into the jungle and survived to write the 2006 essay, was captured by the Guyanese army and forced to return to Jonestown to help identify the dead.
He found his wife in the same position as many mothers, clutching her child.
Let us not forget them. Let us not give the despicable killer Jim Jones any more power to shape our memories.