"They Were More Than Just Faceless Bodies Rotting in the Sun"

"Even still, in America, Jonestown is largely seen as a white catastrophe; in Guyana, it's viewed as a distinctly American one, a late-20th-century experiment in colonialism. In both tellings, and in the many books and films, black people are seen en masse, without individual stories of their own that might tell us something about how private entities learn to prey on black people when civic institutions fail them, and how joy can sometimes be found within that."

Jamilah King at Mother Jones explores the lives of the people of the Peoples Temple, forty years later.