The Ark

In his struggles for integration Jim Jones took personal risks, and he placed his congregation at risk. For their efforts, Jones and his followers suffered considerable harassment from the sizable segment of Indianapolis’s population that vehemently opposed “mixing of the races.” These difficulties, like Jones’s accomplishments as an integrationist, were transported to a mythic level by his followers. Particularly suspect are the recurrent stories of how someone tried to kill Jones by putting crushed glass in his food. To the gullible, the miraculous way the ground glass “passed right through his system” represented sure proof of Jones’s divine power. ¹ But his power was not quite equal to his confrontations with Indianapolis opponents. Jones began to seek a way out of real, imagined, and staged troubles, and Peoples Temple became an ark of migration: at first stranded in Indianapolis, with its leader adrift in Brazil; then bound for California in 1965; twelve years later, headed for Guyana under the intimidating glare of press exposes.