James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader and community organizer. Jones was the founder and the leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass murder-suicide in November 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana,[1] and the murder of five people at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Leo Ryan. Over two hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning.[2] Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head; it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Jones was born in a rural area of Randolph County, Indiana,[3] to James Thurman Jones (1887 – 1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902 – 1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah.[4][5] He was of Irish and Welsh descent.[6] Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue.[6][note 1] Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to nearby Lynn, Indiana in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.[2][7]

Jones was a voracious reader as a child and studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler carefully,[8] noting each of their strengths and weaknesses.[8] Jones also developed an intense interest in religion, primarily because he found making friends difficult.[6] Childhood acquaintances later recalled Jones as being a "really weird kid" who was "obsessed with religion ... obsessed with death". They alleged that he frequently held funerals for small animals on his parents' property and had stabbed a cat to death.[9]

Jim Jones and a childhood friend both claimed that Jones' father, who was an alcoholic, was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.[7] Jones himself, however, came to sympathize with the country's repressed African-American community due to his own experiences as a social outcast. Jones later recounted how he and his father clashed on the issue of race, and how he did not speak with his father for "many, many years" after he refused to allow one of Jones' black friends into the house. After Jones' parents separated, Jones moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana.[10] He graduated from Richmond High School early and with honors in December 1948.[11]

Jones married nurse Marceline Baldwin in 1949, and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.[12] He attended Indiana University Bloomington, where a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of African-Americans impressed him.[12] In 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis, where he attended night school at Butler University, earning a degree in secondary education in 1961.[13]