Peoples Temple was an organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, possessed over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco. It is best known for the death of over 900 of its members on November 18, 1978 in Guyana, at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (informally called “Jonestown”), a nearby airstrip at Port Kaituma, and Georgetown.
The tragedy at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the incidents of September 11, 2001. At the airstrip, Temple members murdered, among others, Congressman Leo Ryan, who became the only Congressman murdered in the line of duty in United States history.
JONES: (Inaudible.) … Don’t, don’t fail to follow my advice. You’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry. If we do it, than that they do it. Have trust. You have to step across. (Music.) We used to think this world was–this world was not our home–well, it sure isn’t–we were saying–it sure wasn’t.
He doesn’t want to tell them. All he’s doing–if they will tell them– assure these kids. Can’t some people assure these children of the relaxation of stepping over to the next plane? They set an example for others. We said –one thousand people who said, we don’t like the way the world is.
VOICE: Take some.
JONES: Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.
