By Brian Neumann

From SFBAY.CA

The Fillmore, Jonestown and the reckoning of racism

For the first time in 40 years, San Francisco held a public event to commemorate the tragic loss of life in the Jonestown massacre in 1978. The public ceremony, dubbed “Homecoming: Day of Atonement in the Fillmore, Reclaiming Heritage in San Francisco,” organized by the New Leadership Foundation (NCLF), an African American nonprofit organization, and San Francisco Beautiful, brought to the forefront the deaths of many African Americans at Jonestown in Guyana…

In 1977, Jones relocated the Peoples Temple to remote Guyana in South America under the disguise of establishing a utopia: Jonestown.

Yulanda Williams, a 62-year-old San Francisco Police Department lieutenant and a Jonestown survivor, was a member of Peoples Temple from 1968 until 1978.

Williams also speaks to the crowd in the Fillmore Heritage Center’s auditorium. When they first arrived in Jonestown, Williams says they had to surrender their passports. They had no return tickets or any other way to return to the U.S.

It was also then, that Williams realized she had to escape Jonestown. She attributes her keen conversational and negotiation skills, as the kid of a preacher, to how she was able to talk Jones into letting her and her family leave Guyana. She and her family were “afforded to be released” from Guyana on June 29, 1977, the year before the massacre. Williams says she and her family are the only recorded family who was granted the permission to leave Jonestown.

Full article @ https://sfbay.ca/2018/11/21/the-fillmore-jonestown-and-the-reckoning-of-racism/