James Warren Jones was an American cult leader, political activist, and self-professed faith healer who led the Peoples Temple, a new religious organization which existed between 1955 and 1978. Jones and his inner circle orchestrated a mass murder-suicide of himself and his followers in his remote jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1955. Jones distinguished himself with his civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1965, he moved the Temple to California, where the group established its headquarters in San Francisco and became heavily involved in left-wing politics through the 1970s. Jones then left the U.S. and established Jonestown, compelling many of his followers to live there with him. By 1978, media reports had surfaced of human rights abuses at Jonestown.
He is most known as the leader of the Peoples Temple cult, wherein he engineered the murder/suicide of about 1,000 members of the group at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. (including more than 200 children). Jones died from a gunshot wound that was most likely self-inflicted.
