Stanley Roy Clayton is a true Jonestown survivor, one of only seven people who was there when the murders/suicides began and who was still alive at the end of that day. And of that seven, he was one of only three people – the other two were Black men, Grover Davis and Odell Rhodes – who made the conscious decision not to participate in the community’s self-immolation. Both Davis, who was 78 at the time, and Rhodes, 36, have since died. Stanley was 25 at the time; if still alive, he would be 73 now.
Stanley was a Temple success story – rescued from drug addiction and alcoholism – and he had the additional cachet of supposedly being the cousin of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey Newton. But he had a rough time throughout his months in Jonestown, including several nighttime meetings in April 1978 when Jim Jones led the community in ridiculing and mocking him. The memory of this degrading treatment may have contributed to his decision not to participate when the deaths began on November 18, 1978.
Following his return from Guyana, Stanley went back to the mean streets of Oakland and the East Bay. He managed to attend numerous memorial services held every year at Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, but he was in increasingly rough shape. His last known address is a halfway house for drug rehabilitation, and there were several periods of his life when he was homeless.
Rumors of Stanley’s death have circulated for several years, mostly on social media platforms that provide neither a date nor a cause of death, but there have been other unconfirmed rumors of his sighting. If he died on the streets and without identification, there is a good chance we will never have any official confirmation of his passing.
We hope that is not the case, that he is in fact still out there, or that there is a piece of information we have yet to uncover that will give him the dignity of recognition in death. If anyone reading this can provide us with either, please contact this site. Thank you.