November 29: On This Day in World History … briefly
Survivors found huddled in the bushes testified that the dead had consumed Kool-Aid laced with cyanide on the orders of their leader, Jim Jones, who apparently described it as ‘an act of revolutionary suicide’ before shooting himself in the head.
1978: Bodies from mass suicide discovered
James Warren Jones was an American civil rights preacher, faith healer, and cult leader who conspired with his inner circle to direct a mass suicide and mass murder of his followers in his jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana. He launched the Peoples Temple in Indiana during the 1950s. Rev. Jones was ordained in 1956 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ. He moved his congregation to California in 1965 and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the 1970s. He then left the United States, bringing many members to a Guyana jungle commune.
In 1978, media reports surfaced of human rights abuses in the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. US Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune to investigate. Ryan and others were murdered by gunfire while boarding a return flight with some former cult members who had wished to leave. Jones then ordered and likely coerced a mass suicide and mass murder of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, almost all by cyanide-poisoned Kool-Aid.
Horrified rescue workers came across the bizarre mass suicide at the site of the Reverend Jim Jones’s People’s Temple in Guyana. Alterted by the disappearance of Congressman Leo Ryan and his five colleagues, they found more than 900 corpses scattered about the Temple grounds.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Like the South Coast Herald’s Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and Instagram
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