 |
| California Historical Society |
By Sikivu Hutchinson*
They
didn’t “drink the Kool Aid”. They
came from all over the United States—black teachers from Los Angeles, white
Pentecostals from Indianapolis, black Southern transplants at the tail end of
the Great Migration, Vietnam vets and ex-hippies from San Francisco. Mostly
though, they were African Americans of all backgrounds, ages, sexual
orientations and political persuasions, bound by family, spouses and soulmates,
seduced by the collective vision of racial utopia and adventure embodied by an
activist church called Peoples Temple.
On
November 18, 1978, nine hundred and nine Peoples Temple members (including over
three hundred children) lay dead in the Jonestown, Guyana jungle settlement
named after the church’s white founder, the Reverend Jim Jones. After a night
of terror, spurred by an investigative tour led by U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, members
died from a lethal cocktail of cyanide and Flavor Aid; some by choice, some by
force. Nearly fifty percent of Jonestown’s dead were black women.
As
the largest murder-suicide in American history, the Jonestown massacre has
become an indelible part of cultural myth, shorthand for blind faith and a cautionary
tale about religious obsession. The graphic
sprawl of the Jonestown victims’ bodies, notoriously memorialized in photos that
sent shockwaves across the world, is marked as grotesquely “other”, parodied in
crude pop culture jokes and lore. But hidden
beneath the psycho cult clichés is the power of black women in the Peoples
Temple movement. As the largest
demographic in Peoples Temple black women have seldom been portrayed as lead
protagonists in popular representations of Jonestown. Despite the horror of Jonestown’s demise its representation
cannot be separated from dehumanizing cultural representations of black people
in general and black women in particular.
While Jonestown as cultural “artifact” is perversely sexy—the object of near
necrophilic projection and fantasy—Peoples Temple is a historical stepchild; its
legacy an unwelcome reflection of the race, gender and class divide in “New Jim
Crow” America. The inequitable conditions that compelled black women to commit
their lives to the church and its mission are still relevant today.
Founded
by Jones in Indianapolis in the 1950s, Peoples Temple was initially a
Pentecostal congregation. Early on, Jones
actively recruited African American parishioners, arousing the ire of the white
Indianapolis religious establishment. African Americans played a key role in
the church’s growth as a social welfare provider for the poor, elderly and
indigent. Jones’ social gospel message dovetailed with that of the civil rights
movement, attracting elderly black women members like sisters Zipporah and
Hyacinth Thrash (the only survivor left at Jonestown the morning after the
massacre). Through their wages, Social Security benefits and property, black
women provided the economic base of Peoples Temple, as well as Jonestown.
When Jones prophesied nuclear holocaust in
the sixties he relocated the congregation to California, establishing a churches
in Ukiah, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Settling in San Francisco’s
predominantly African American Fillmore District, the church took on
gentrifying developers and challenged the city’s attempts to push out poor
people of color through eminent domain. Ditching
old school Pentecostalism for a secular “apostolic” socialism, Jones actively
courted the Bay Area liberal political establishment, and Temple members’ votes
reputedly helped
George Moscone’s 1975 mayoral victory.
Yet,
although there have been numerous portrayals of PT’s shrewd politicking, the racial
politics of gender in the movement have gotten relatively short shrift. In my book White Nights, Black Paradise, Peoples Temple is not only symbolic
of progressive black social gospel traditions but of a racially divided secular
women’s movement. It is no secret that
white women called the shots in Peoples Temple and that their leadership was
resented by some of the black rank and file.
The movement’s veneer of interracial “sisterhood” was compromised by the
reality of white female paternalism. Survivor
Leslie Wagner-Wilson alludes to these tensions in her book, Slavery of Faith. And in White
Nights, Black Paradise black women’s suspicion of white women’s dominance is
symptomatic of the racial fault lines in second wave feminism. As with the power struggles of the women’s
suffrage era, the largely white middle class leadership of the women’s movement
(represented by groups like the National Organization for Women) was willfully
ignorant of if not downright hostile to the intersectional experiences of women
of color. At the core of second wave white
feminist ideology was Betty Friedan’s Feminine
Mystique, a text which universalized the experiences of white middle class
women pushing back against the narrow confines of domesticity, marriage and
motherhood.
While
revelatory for many white women, the Feminine
Mystique didn’t address the realities of women of color who not only had to
work but often served as maids and domestics in white women’s homes. Unspoken in white women’s critiques of gender
and power in the home and workplace was the fact that postwar wealth massively
advantaged white families. New Deal
institutions like the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill and the Veterans
Administration agency allowed working class and “ethnic” whites to move from
inner cities or working class suburbs into more affluent suburban subdivisions
protected from the dark other. Further,
while suburban white women took advantage of job opportunities opened up by the
Civil Rights Bill of 1964, black women were shut out. This fact was compounded by redlining
policies which excluded blacks from buying homes in suburban communities with
greater access to white collar jobs. As
a result, when it came to equitable access to homeownership and professional
jobs, black women were only nominally more “liberated” in the Promised Land
than they were under Jim Crow.
In
both Los Angeles and San Francisco African Americans of all classes were
tightly confined to working class black neighborhoods in South L.A., the
Western Addition/Fillmore and Bay Point.
White privilege conferred the white women in Peoples Temple with
mobility, prestige and decision-making power over their black female
counterparts.
But
if Peoples Temple was a political force, it was partly due to black women’s investment
in it as an alternative to the staid conservatism of the Black Church.
According to a 2012 Kaiser
Foundation/Washington Post poll,
black women are among the most steadfastly religious groups in the nation. Only 2% said that being religious was not
important to them at all (compared to 15% of white men), while 74% said that it
was extremely important. Numerous surveys have touted the decline of American
religiosity within the past decade. Yet, in an era of black economic
depression, the need to be devout or churched up has not diminished for most
African American women, despite the patriarchal, heterosexist orientation of
the Black Church.
Peoples
Temple reflected this duality. When former Los Angeles member Juanell Smart joined in the
early seventies, she “had given up on religion and ministers”. Disillusioned with the moral hypocrisy of
some churches, Jones’ criticism of abusive relationships resonated with her. For Smart, Thrash, Wagner-Wilson and others who
followed family members into the church, Peoples Temple provided a bridge
between the radical politics of the Black Power movement and the waning civil
rights focus of the Black Church. The
Temple forged strategic, if wary, relationships with the Nation of Islam (most
notably at a 1976 Los Angeles event attended by then Mayor Tom Bradley and
Angela Davis), the Black Panthers and progressive black churches. African American members felt validated by
its high profile organizing around affirmative action, affordable housing, police
brutality, South African apartheid and the odious 1978 Briggs Initiative,
which would have denied gays and lesbians the right to teach in California
public schools.
However,
the Temple’s pro-black activism disguised a power structure largely comprised
of white women fatally loyal to Jones, who loved to proclaim his “blackness” while
playing the white savior. As the church grew more regimented and authoritarian,
they became his henchwomen, sexual partners and enforcers. Hit by multiple allegations of abuse and
fraud in the late seventies, Peoples Temple uprooted for Jonestown.
The
Jonestown settlement in the Afro-Indian nation of Guyana was intended to be an
antidote to these “persecutions”, a self-sufficient commune and “Promised Land”
free of racism. For black Temple members who’d sought refuge from Southern Jim
Crow in California—only to experience racially restrictive covenants, job
discrimination and state violence—Jonestown evoked African Americans’ diasporic
quest for home and identity.
Once
there, the church self-destructed, mired in a culture of tyrannical control created
by the increasingly paranoid, drug-addled Jones. Tragically, Temple members
were themselves complicit in the humiliation and torture of fellow parishioners.
When Jones exhorted them to commit mass suicide on that fateful night, some
truly believed they would be wiped out by the terrorists he claimed were igniting
race wars back in the U.S. On the so-called
“death tape” documenting the community’s last hours, a courageous black woman
named Christine Miller
can be heard resisting these lies and is shouted down by the crowd; prelude to
the brutal end of a fractured dream of self-determination.
Juanell Smart lost her four children,
her mother and an uncle in Jonestown.
Her writings on her experience capture her ambivalence toward Jones
while she was as a counselor and member of the Temple planning commission. Now
an atheist, she remarked in an interview with me last year, “I grew up
believing that there was a sky god and he was going to take care of me. Then Jim came along and said that there
wasn’t a god other than him. Jim aped
what the black ministers did but he added a caveat and I’ll just throw in this
and be their savior. Him calling himself
God was a means to an end. What picture
have people seen of Jesus Christ?” She notes that, “I have always been a
skeptic so it was hard for me to be a true believer for any length of
time.” Smart’s skepticism and
questioning of authority led her to break from Peoples Temple before the mass
emigration to Jonestown.
Sikivu
Hutchinson is the author of White
Nights, Black Paradise, the first novel to be written
by an African American woman on Peoples Temple and Jonestown.
*Portions of this piece are excerpted from the Jonestown Institute Review
