Kool-Aid tastes better with a little potassium cyanide, according to Jim Jones. In 1978, the Jonestown Massacre occurred in northern Guyana where nearly a thousand people died in this mass murder disguised as a suicide. The individual behind it all is Jim Jones. From a young age, Jones began taking interest in the Church and began preaching despite his mother’s prohibition. Jones’ childhood was challenging as he juggled poverty, an ill father, and a neglecting mother. Jones’ father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which disturbed and angered Jones. After meeting his wife in Indiana, he became a Methodist minister who was prophesied to be a great prophet of God. Jones and his wife adopted multiple children, one of them being the first black child to…show more content… In her article, Sikivu Hutchinson wonders if there were any black feminists in Jonestown, challenging the notion of equality within the community. The erasure of black women was said to be “a double victimization because the people who were victimized get hidden by Jim Jones’ ego and it makes them into a bunch of freaks. It’s important to bring out that this was a significant event and it needs to be registered along the lines of major tragic events in black history” (Hutchinson). Hutchinson also researched the history of this erasure and the historian James Lance Taylor said, “More than three decades of sensationalist media reportage has prevented common knowledge among Americans.. And most of all average black Americans, that Peoples Temple was as much a ‘black movement’ as the Harlem Renaissance, black labor struggles, the civil rights movement, the earliest stages of Black Power and modern day hip hop”(Hutchinson). Jonestown was as significant as the other events. The impact Jones made on black Americans was never as positive as he intended or pretended
