Surreal doesn’t convey the fictional quality of hundreds of happy children obliviously awaiting their deaths watching “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” or their Kool-Aid executioner just two years earlier enjoying a private audience with the soon-to-be president’s wife. Jonestown retains this dreamlike state decades after it has decayed into the jungle. Rebecca Moore, Julia Scheeres, and other writers seek in the 21st century to raise the 20th-century dead. Could we have misunderstood the people of the Peoples Temple the way they misunderstood the god of the Peoples Temple?
Jim Jones killed more African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan. Julia Scheeres, in her new book, A Thousand Lives, juxtaposes the preacher with Rosa Parks and the students who held a lunch-counter sit-in at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s. Jim Jones called blacks his equals. He let them join his church. He even adopted an African-American boy. Then he imprisoned, enslaved, and ultimately murdered hundreds of African-Americans at his Guyanese concentration camp. He started off with the best of intentions, the text leads readers to think.
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