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,”…
DetailsJonestown survivor and author Leslie Wagner Wilson and writer-educator Sikivu Hutchinson discuss the myths and misconceptions around Peoples Temple, Jonestown and Black women’s religious and political agency on host Vida Starr’s March 2018 RadioJustice.org podcast “The Breakdown”. What are the contemporary implications of Jonestown in light of Black human rights and socioeconomic disenfranchisement and how…
Detailsby 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…
Detailsby Juanell “Nell” Smart | Original Article One of the hardest things for me to do is to sit alone and reflect on anything associated with Peoples Temple. I go through a myriad of emotions – good, bad, warm, empty – and I am sure that I am not alone in this. I remember my…
DetailsGregg 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,”…
Detailsby Sikivu Hutchinson | Original Article For most people, the story of the 1978 Jonestown massacre is simple—a bunch of gullible Kool Aid drinking cultists from San Francisco followed a crazy manipulative white man into the jungle “Heart of Darkness” style and were systematically killed in the largest mass murder-suicide in American history. For decades,…
DetailsSikivu 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…
DetailsSikivu 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…
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