Both Scheeres and her brother experienced what she described as physical and psychological punishment. Scheeres, who grew up in Indiana not far from Jones’ church, was sent to reform school in the Dominican Republic along with her adopted African-American brother. Scheeres was moved to write her book due to several parallels she saw between her life and the Jonestown story. The volunteers were prohibited from leaving the intentional community of Jonestown and tortured to the point at which they agreed to suicide. The good-doers were soon in trouble, as their charismatic leader, Jim Jones descended into madness and drug addiction, according to Scheeres. The Jonestown Massacre resulted after religious leader, Jim Jones, hoaxed hundreds of his church members into moving to Jonestown, Guyana to volunteer their services to locals and to live in an idyllic socialistic society that would be free from the malignant forces of race, class, gender and so forth. On April 3, journalist and writer Julia Scheeres discussed her new book “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown” in her talk “Narrating Jonestown and the Peoples Temple.” This lecture was part of the spring lecture series, Jonestown: Reconsidered, that sheds light onto the tragedy that is brought to the University by the the Griot Institute for Africana Studies. Despite this fact, it has received almost no attention in comparison with other tragedies. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Jonestown massacre held the record as the deadliest massacre in American history, with 909 fatalities in 1978.
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