Biography of jim jones jonestown massacre ballad

Origins of the Peoples Temple

Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the tragedy at Jonestown marked the single largest loss of U.S. civilian lives in a non-natural disaster. The megalomaniacal man behind the tragedy, Jim Jones, came from humble beginnings.

Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in rural Indiana. In the early 1950s, he began working as a self-ordained Christian minister in small churches around Indianapolis. In order to raise money to start a church of his own, the charismatic Jones tried various ventures, including selling live monkeys door-to-door.

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More than 400 unclaimed bodies from the Jonestown tragedy are buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where many of Jim Jones' followers were from. A stone memorial to the Jonestown victims was unveiled at the cemetery in 2008.

Jones opened his first Peoples Temple church in Indianapolis in the mid-1950s.

His congregation was racially integrated, something unusual at the tim