“Which black brother will take this on?” Jones called. A volunteer came forward.
As the sound of swats echoed throughout the church, he explained, “Part of this is humiliation more than physical pain, so all you standing up, get out of the way [so the others can see].” Jones counted the licks out loud. “Eighteen ... nineteen ... twenty.... Now what do you have to say, son?”
“I’m sorry,” Mason said. “I won’t do this anymore.”
Softening, Jones explained that the discipline was designed to kill rebelliousness that might land the boy in prison. “Don’t fight the world,” he advised. “If it hadn’t been a sister, you’d be in jail.... You’d be up the river, like George Jackson, who was just about your age. We’re trying to help you. We’re not trying to be mean.”
Bob Houston was sent into at least two gladiatorial events. In one boxing match, he suffered a bloody nose and a shiner and was greatly embarrassed in front of his family. He tried to fight back, with little luck. As he was pummeled, Jones sat behind the podium on his stool and chortled.
Another time, after troubles in the commune became public, Bob’s punishment was to sit in the front row at services—like a troublesome child—and to show unqualified enthusiasm for Jones by waving his arms in the air, swaying and shouting praise like the Pentecostal blacks. But the discipline that hurt Bob most resulted from Joyce’s March 1975 memo complaining about his obstructionism in the commune.
On one recent night, the Temple had been gutted by fire under mysterious circumstances. Jones had kept his congregation an extra long time in Redwood Valley services, delaying departure to San Francisco time and time again, telling his people he had a premonition of danger. When the buses rolled up to the San Francisco temple, fire trucks still were parked outside the smoldering building. While church members praised Jones’s prescience for saving them from certain death, arson investigators concluded that the stairway had been doused with flammable liquid. By whom, it was never known.
The restoration provided a ready project to occupy Temple kids, unemployed members—and Bob Houston. At a Sunday night meeting in the partially restored church, Jones decreed that Houston should start work immediately, without even going home to change out of his business suit. Houston, though taken aback, agreed to Jones’s Maoist-like “reeducation.”
For over three months, Bob was absent from the commune and saw little of his wife and daughters. The punishment was expedient: at the time there was a railroad layoff, and Houston would not have a good-paying job anyway. This way he could collect unemployment benefits and do church work. For his part, Houston tried to make the best of a painful situation by learning about building trades.
In July, when the railroad began rehiring laid-off workers, Bob wanted to return to work and also move home. “What do you think about my coming back?” he asked Joyce. She replied, eagerly: “I’d love it.” Though she had been responsible for his being disciplined, she regretted it. She needed and missed him. With Jones’s permission, Houston rejoined his family.
Running the commune on her own had taxed Joyce’s energies beyond capacity. In addition to commune duties and her regular job, she coordinated medical care for Temple members in San Francisco. As in Ukiah, the church provided the best available. Despite Jones’s so-called miracle healings, he encouraged his people to see doctors.
When people needed medical attention, they came to Joyce with their symptoms. Every few weeks, she took her list of people and ailments to Dr. A. for a consultation. The doctor, who also happened to be one of Jones’s personal physicians, would take an hour and a half of his time at no charge, then make referrals to some of the best doctors in town.
To his own doctors, Jones was an enigma. The “great healer” spent long hours visiting various physicians. He always arrived with bodyguards, tough-looking but deliberately low-key, who would hang around the waiting room door. Jones spoke openly about his biggest fear—that the government and others were out to get him—and expressed concern about the rise of fascism in the United States. Although his only physical ailment was a chronic, nonserious urinary tract problem, he also exhibited signs of stress and hypochondria. He complained of chest pains and talked incessantly about his sacrifices; he even spoke of his sexual services as part of his duty. The doctors presumed he was sleeping little, eating improperly and irregularly and carrying too large a burden.
At one point, a doctor suggested that he enter a hospital for complete rest and an examination. Jones consented to a psychiatric examination. The diagnosis: “paranoid with delusions of grandeur.” Once out of the hospital, Jones boasted of having undergone the examination, as if to show his people there was no onus attached to it. Jones, who had once bragged that he could beat any lie detector, said that the psychiatrist had found his mind “in perfect working order.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
San Francisco in Thrall
By the late 1960s, the city with the magical fog and hilly white look of a Mediterranean seaport had been energized by its second “Gold Rush”—tourism. But though downtown San Francisco had been transformed into a West Coast Manhattan of glass and concrete towers full of white-collar commuters, important political developments were afoot in the neighborhoods.
From the sunny “Mission” to the often foggy Sunset District near the beach, San Francisco had been a proud, mainly white, working-class town. For many years, labor and “Downtown” had controlled the balance of political power. But in the 1960s the rules of the game changed. Asians, either recent immigrants or descendants of the Gold Rush’s cheap labor force, had moved into white enclaves in western San Francisco and enlarged their numbers. At the same time, more Latinos had arrived, the population of blacks in San Francisco had almost tripled—and a new power equation emerged in local politics.
There was a shift from citywide elections of county supervisors to district elections, which many felt would give black, yellow and brown people a better shot at representation.35 Campaign spending limits and reporting requirements were introduced in the early 1970s. And together these factors bestowed unprecedented power on neighborhood associations, ethnic groups, interest groups and others who could be pulled together into coalitions. The days of calamari clubs and fat cat contributors seemed at a close; the days of Peoples Temple and community alliances were dawning.
It was only a matter of time before Jim Jones, operating in the black community, would meet Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett. A physician in the San Francisco black community since 1945, Goodlett was a curious mixture of civil rights fighter, black businessman and political kingmaker known by some as the godfather of the city’s black politics. Since 1948, he had published the weekly black newspaper, the Sun Reporter. In the 1966 gubernatorial race he had placed third, and by the early 1970s Goodlett was president of the black National Newspaper Publishers Association and served on just about every board of distinction in the local black community. Reportedly a millionaire through his three-pronged business ventures—medicine, publishing and urban developing—Goodlett put money behind his politics. And although some viewed him as abrasive, abrupt and cantankerous, he was an important and consistent voice for minority rights.
Goodlett first encountered Jones in the course of his medical work —and at political rallies. Jones patronized Goodlett’s medical offices himself and sent some members of his own family, including his mother. Contacts with the Joneses—plus hundreds of other Temple patients—acquainted Goodlett with the church’s human services ministry. These visits made it easier for Goodlett to buy Jones’s explanation that his controversial healings were really the elimination of psychosomatic ailments.
Goodlett was most impressed that people he had known for years seemed to be leading happy and functional lives. The Temple, like the Black Muslims, showed a capacity for turning wayward youths into dedicated social activists. Temple bus trips took the elderly poor and ghetto children, some of whom had never left San Francisco, across the country. Goodlett respected Jones’s de
monstrated longtime commitment to equal rights, enough to present him with the Sun Reporter Special Merit Award in April, 1972. Somehow, a warm rapport had developed between the white minister who wished he could be black and the fast-talking black physician who could well have been a preacher.
Sun Reporter editor Tom Fleming, as burly as Goodlett was wiry, also developed a rapport with Jones. Fleming had defended the Ukiah church in print against the 1972 Examiner stories, believing that Kinsolving was motivated by racial prejudices. A year or so later when he was invited to the Geary Boulevard Temple, Fleming at first declined because visitors were pat-searched at the door. When that humiliation was waived, he did visit—and liked what he saw: a nursery school, a printing plant, a free physical therapy clinic and more. Fleming concluded that Jones was using religion to recruit blacks and was an uncompromising integrationist.
Though anything but religious himself, the journalist fell into an informal relationship with the Temple. He went there to chicken dinners a few times, and out to a coffee shop for lunches with church people, usually public relations man Mike Prokes. Fleming, old enough to be his father, told Prokes about being black in the pre-civil rights days, while the white former television newsman launched into accounts of what he said was FBI and CIA harassment.
There was no more devout advocate than Prokes, and few more sincere members. He had arrived some years earlier as an unexpected windfall from the Kinsolving series. A TV newsman in Modesto at the time, he had come to the Temple to do an expose on Jones in October 1972, but liked the people and respected Jones’s forthright critique of the American system. When he joined, Prokes provided exactly what Jones needed to combat a prying press: an imagemaker and media adviser.
Increasing paranoia soon marked Temple contacts with Tom Fleming. The Sun Reporter was called with reports of the arson fire at the Temple. Then calls reporting unprovable threats against Jones started coming once and even twice a week. Finally Fleming told the minister, “Jim, you got to learn to live with it.”
Meanwhile Goodlett was receiving visits from alarmed citizens. A delegation of black ministers complained that Jones was stealing their members, breaking up families and collecting property. “Listen,” Goodlett told them, “this man looks to me like he’s pretty successful in interpreting the functional gospel. I don’t know what brand of whiskey he drinks, but if he drinks a special brand of whiskey, you better drink it yourself.”
Despite these and later complaints to be laid on his doorstep, Goodlett would steadfastly maintain the value of Temple work. Though head of a sometimes crusading newspaper, he never attempted to delve into allegations that continued to surface. (Later he would maintain that church controversies were sticky business for a community newspaper and that he did not have the staff to investigate properly.)
But the publisher also had a personal, political and business association with Jones. Goodlett had permitted the church to use his medical license to open the physical therapy clinic at the church and had used his influence to help Temple member Larry Schacht get into medical school. He allowed the Temple to print its newspaper, Peoples Forum, on his presses, with payment only for printer’s time. In 1976, Goodlett and Jones became involved with others in an import-export company. Later, Goodlett and the Temple each invested $35,000 to help save the failing Norfolk, Virginia, Journal and Guide, the third oldest black newspaper in the nation.
The Goodlett-Jones relationship was of mutual benefit. When the Temple first went to Guyana, Goodlett wrote a letter of recommendation to the editors of the Guyana Chronicle. And while the Sun Reporter bestowed its blessings on Jones, the Temple newspaper returned the compliment by praising Goodlett and by encouraging all Temple members to subscribe to his publication.
Goodlett teased Jones sometimes about his dark glasses, and Jones fondly called Goodlett a “Cadillac Communist” behind his back. But they enjoyed their shoot-from-the-hip conversations, which sometimes slipped into theology. Jones would argue that Christ’s church had been in effect a communal organization and cult. Goodlett told him he thought the Temple was a cult too, and the two talked about various cult leaders such as Father Divine and Daddy Grace. Goodlett was too admittedly egotistical to be threatened by Jones’s presence, and was little impressed by Jones’s so-called charisma.
The charisma of Jones did not awe Rev. Cecil Williams either. And like Goodlett, he felt a kinship with the new maverick minister and his progressive church.
Among black ministers, Williams had long been an exception. His services at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, the same church once pastored by Carolyn Layton’s father, had been likened to nightclub performances. Williams, hirsute and wont to wear dashikis, orchestrated “celebrations of humanity” conducted in a singalong atmosphere complete with guitars and drums. The message not only lured blacks and whites, poor and not so poor, into the Tenderloin area church but also reached across the nation via the mass media.
At rallies for progressive causes, Williams was frankly surprised to see large numbers of blacks enthusiastically cheering on a white preacher named Jones. He was given a taste of Temple methods on the tenth anniversary of his San Francisco ministry, in November 1975. The event, a testimonial service at Glide followed by a jazz-soul music concert at the Cow Palace auditorium, was marred before it could begin. There was an anonymous threat on Williams’s life. Then, when the Temple contingent descended on Glide, Jones announced that his security team wanted to frisk everyone entering. Williams refused politely.
Thousands of Williams’s friends and supporters thronged to services highlighted by tributes from influential liberal and leftist leaders. Among them were future Temple friends and allies: Goodlett, black communist Angela Davis, State Assemblyman Willie Brown and future mayor George Moscone. In that perfect setting, Jones could hardly conceal his rivalry.
Resplendent in a suit, Jim Jones was dramatically escorted to the stage by bodyguards. With his thousand faithful casting adoring shouts and applauding, Jones spoke, alluding to threats on his own life, praising Williams’s work, attacking the “terrorism” of U.S. government agencies at home and abroad. When he finished his speech with a ringing oath of solidarity—“[If] you come for one of us, you damn well better come for all of us”—his members burst into a tumultuous forty-five seconds of applause.
Williams received only a smattering by comparison. Then the insult was compounded at that night’s Cow Palace concert when Jones’s one thousand members, occupying a bloc of seats that had cost the Temple $5,000, stood up in the middle of the show and walked out en masse.
Two days later, Jones called Williams and explained that a church emergency had necessitated the rude early departure. Not wanting to hear the lie, Williams retorted: “Jim, I don’t need an explanation.”
Soon Williams was getting 2:00 A.M. and 3:00 A.M. phone calls from the solicitous Jones. Seeming paranoid, the white minister expressed fears for his life. In particular, he wanted to discuss the problems he was having with black ministers, whose members were flocking to the Temple.
One of the major contradictions for black leaders exposed to the Temple was the gap between Jones’s antiracist rhetoric and Temple practices. Though Jones affected black speech patterns in addressing them and used to say, “I would give anything to be black,” he could hardly disguise the racism in his own organization. Goodlett, Williams and Assemblyman Willie Brown could not help commenting on the fact that few blacks were around Jones making decisions.
It was not Williams, but Assemblyman Willie Brown, who provided the bridge to the Establishment power structure. Shortly before the Cecil Williams testimonial, Brown and other prominent San Francisco Democrats were discussing the 1975 mayoral candidacy of State Senator George Moscone. The conversation had turned to recruitment of volunteer workers—an especially important consideration due to new campaign spending limits.
Since Moscone’s opponent, conservative realtor John Barbagelata, had great strength in the populous white western
sectors, it was incumbent on Moscone backers to get out the vote in traditionally liberal areas, particularly black areas. During the discussion, someone suggested that Brown line up Peoples Temple volunteers. Soon the Temple was being bandied about as one of the community groups needed to pull together a winning liberal coalition—and install the city’s first liberal administration. Some felt that using the Temple amounted to hiring mercenaries with loyalty only to Jones and his church. In the end, though, the response was: “They can get hundreds of people, they are disciplined, and they’ll take [the work] we have to give them.”
The Temple leaped at the chance to help. Before the election, they turned out about two hundred volunteers who saturated black neighborhoods for two days. They efficiently distributed slate cards bearing the names Moscone for mayor, Joseph Freitas for district attorney and Richard Hongisto for sheriff—all white liberals, though not formally allied. In the November local election and December mayoral runoff, the Temple did get-out-the-vote work and also dispatched several hundred members to help at Moscone’s campaign headquarters downtown. By all indications, they had done a good job: Moscone won, though by only four thousand votes. Freitas and Hongisto won more easily.
In the postelection euphoria over the victory, various organizations claimed credit, the Temple included. Jones made sure that Moscone felt indebted not only for volunteer assistance but for votes: he boasted that the Temple had eight thousand San Francisco members among twenty thousand statewide. Ukiah Democrats had already relayed the observation that Jones’s people voted as a bloc. So it left the impression, logically, that the Moscone margin might well have been provided by the Temple.
That is exactly what Jones wanted the politicians to think. In truth, Temple membership figures were greatly exaggerated. At best three thousand to five thousand persons belonged to the Temple and few—not even Jones—were registered to vote in San Francisco. (In fact, voter rolls showed later that only several dozen of the 913 persons who died at Jonestown had been eligible to vote in the 1975 San Francisco election.) That fall, Temple members probably provided no more than a few hundred votes.
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