Source: http://www.blackjonestown.org/ (Inactive)
Black Jonestown was a website established by three African American women to showcase the voices of Black members of the Temple, especially its women. Yulanda Williams is a former member of Peoples Temple who went to Guyana but left in 1977. Leslie Wagner Wilson is also a former member of Peoples Temple who went to Guyana, and who escaped the deaths with her son on 18 November 1978. Sikivu Hutchinson is a scholar, activist, and artist who has written extensively on Peoples Temple and Black feminism.
“I was so honored to hear survivors and learn about the hierarchy of the Jonestown system. I was unaware of the escapees & survivors, I thought all perished.”
—>Museum of the African Diaspora audience member, July 2017
On November 18, 1978 Leslie escaped Jonestown, Guyana with her son (then 3 years old) and nine others, trekking over 30 odd miles through the jungle and railroad tracks to a town called Matthews Ridge.
Sikivu Hutchinson, Ph.D. is an educator and author who received her doctorate from New York University. Sikivu has written and published extensively on the African American experience in Peoples Temple and Jonestown.
Yulanda is a Jonestown survivor, and an advocate for equality, freedom and social justice. Yulanda has been a sworn member of the San Francisco Police Department for 28 years.
by Jakari L. Wilson | Original Article My mother is someone that maybe some of you know. Her name is Leslie Wagner Wilson, author of the book Slavery of Faith. But this is a story which I feel is not as impressive as the way that I perceive her. To me, my mother is a…
Gregg Reese | Our Weekly “Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It” (Attributed to philosopher George Santayana) posted over the stage at The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, Guyana. Noted academic, author, and playwright Sikivu Hutchinson mounted a theatrical reading of her acclaimed 2015 novel “White Nights, Black Paradise,”…
by Sikivu Hutchinson | Original Article I boarded the plane in a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last time. Nursing mothers with squealing babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles, Ebony magazines and Readers’ Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas. On our…
Sikivu Hutchinson | Huffington Post Thirty-eight years ago, on November 18, 1978, nine hundred and nine Peoples Temple church members (including over three hundred children) died from a cyanide cocktail of Flavor Aid in the Jonestown, Guyana jungle settlement named after the church’s white founder, the Reverend Jim Jones. The majority of those who died…
Sikivu Hutchinson | Religion Dispatches 35 years ago, on November 19, 1978, 73-year-old Hyacinth Thrash awoke to a nightmare in the jungles of Guyana. In one of the largest murder-suicides in world history, 918 people from her Peoples Temple church lay dead before her eyes, poisoned by a lethal cocktail of cyanide and fruit punch. The…
by Sikivu Hutchinson | Original Article Black lesbian poet and activist Audre Lourde once said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Lourde was one of the most fiercely eloquent champions of the revolutionary right of black women to witness and speak…
by Jakari L. Wilson | Original Article My mother is someone that maybe some of you know. Her name is Leslie Wagner Wilson, author of the book Slavery of Faith. But this is a story which I feel is not as impressive as the way that I perceive her. To me, my mother is a…
Gregg Reese | Our Weekly “Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It” (Attributed to philosopher George Santayana) posted over the stage at The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, Guyana. Noted academic, author, and playwright Sikivu Hutchinson mounted a theatrical reading of her acclaimed 2015 novel “White Nights, Black Paradise,”…
by Sikivu Hutchinson | Original Article I boarded the plane in a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last time. Nursing mothers with squealing babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles, Ebony magazines and Readers’ Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas. On our…
Sikivu Hutchinson | Huffington Post Thirty-eight years ago, on November 18, 1978, nine hundred and nine Peoples Temple church members (including over three hundred children) died from a cyanide cocktail of Flavor Aid in the Jonestown, Guyana jungle settlement named after the church’s white founder, the Reverend Jim Jones. The majority of those who died…
Sikivu Hutchinson | Religion Dispatches 35 years ago, on November 19, 1978, 73-year-old Hyacinth Thrash awoke to a nightmare in the jungles of Guyana. In one of the largest murder-suicides in world history, 918 people from her Peoples Temple church lay dead before her eyes, poisoned by a lethal cocktail of cyanide and fruit punch. The…
by Sikivu Hutchinson | Original Article Black lesbian poet and activist Audre Lourde once said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Lourde was one of the most fiercely eloquent champions of the revolutionary right of black women to witness and speak…
