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Jones was born in Crete, Indiana, a small rural community. His father, James Jones, was a World War One veteran.
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During the Great Depression (1934), economic trouble forced the Jones family to move to Lynn, Indiana. Claims have been made, by Jones and by one of his childhood friends, that Jones' father was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.
Some of Jones' childhood acquaintances remember him as a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death." He is alleged to have held many funerals for small animals; some reports even suggest that he once stabbed a cat to death. -
Jones' parents separated in 1948, and he moved to Richmond, Indiana with his mother. Jones was an avid reader; he studied Stalin, Marx, Gandhi, and Hitler, analyzing their collective strengths and weaknesses.
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Jones graduated early, with honors, from Richmond High School.
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Jones married a nurse called Marceline Baldwin, and moved with her to Bloomington, Indiana.
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Jones initially attended Indiana University at Bloomington, and later earned a degree in secondary education from Butler University. During this time, he developed sympathy for Communist ideology, and became concerned with the position of African-Americans in society.
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Jones became a member of the Communist Party USA, and was concerned about the harrassment of Communists as a result of McCarthyism. He had been fascinated by religion since his childhood, and decided a church would be a good mechanism for spreading his ideology. He focused on racial integration within the church, and used faith-healings to attract attention.
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Starting in 1953, Jones and his wife adopted a total of three Korean children, a Native American child, a black child, and a white child, in addition to their one biological child. Jones referred to this as his "rainbow family."
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Jones opened a People's Temple soup kitchen for the needy, and simultaneously expanded the Temple's social outreach programs, helping people to find jobs, et cetera.
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Jones was appointed director of the Human Rights Commission for Indianapolis, and he became an outspoken advocate for racial integration. Among other actions, he contributed to the integration of restaurants, churches, an amusement park, a theater, a police department, and a hospital.
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Jones became afraid of a nuclear apocalypse, and traveled overseas to Guyana and Brazil in search of a sanctuary from nuclear destruction. He had planned to set up another Temple in one of these countries, but upon being informed that the Indiana Temple was on the verge of collapse, he returned to help them instead.
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Initially, Jones had not blatantly displayed his socialism, but during these years, he began to show it more. He also began to openly criticize traditional Christianity, even admitting that he was an atheist.
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Jones relocated the People's Temple headquarters to San Francisco. In the following years, he became exceptionally popular with countless politicians, building relationships with California Governor Jerry Brown and First Lady Rosalynn Carter, among others.
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Around this time, the membership of the People's Temple was listed as 2,570.
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The magazine "Religion in American Life" named Jim Jones one of the top 100 most outstanding American clergymen.
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In 1976, the Los Angeles Herald newspaper awarded Jones the title of "Humanitarian of the Year." Also during this year, Jones was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority.
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Jones discovered an article about to be published in New West Magazine about alleged physical, emotional, and sexual abuse within the People's Temple, and as a result, decided to relocate the Temple to Guyana. He brought several hundred followers, and named this new settlement Jonestown.
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The settlement was supposed to exemplify pure socialism, and did not allow anyone to leave. It was also here that Jones began the idea of Translation, in which he and his followers would die together and live blissfully on another planet.
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Some concerned members of the Temple circulated a bundle of documents entitled "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones" to Congress and the media.
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Jones hired Mark Lane and Donald Freed, well-known conspiracy theorists, to fabricate a case for a government conspiracy against the People's Temple.
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909 Temple members, including 303 children, died of cyanide poisoning. Jones convinced the people to commit "revolutionary suicide" by insisting that the US government was on the way to brutually crack down on their movement. He told them not to fear death, because death is "just stepping over into another plane ... a friend."
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U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan took a group of reporters to Jonestown to find out what was really going on. One Temple member attacked Ryan with a knife, and they tried to leave hastily, taking fifteen Temple members with them. Ryan and four others were killed in a shootout as they attempted to leave.
