'SOMEBODY SAY KOOL-AID?' - ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION
CULT SERIES [JONESTOWN]
Jim Jones, self-proclaimed faith-healer, was the founder of the Peoples Temple religious cult. After accusations of inhumane treatment by former members became public in 1977, Jones relocated the group to a remote compound in Guyana, South America, having convinced his followers it was unsafe to remain in the states. Jonestown, however, was not the utopia he had promised. Investigating rumors of extreme physical and psychological abuse, US Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in November of 1978. The day he was set to return to the states, several cult members attempted to flee the compound along with Ryan. Jones ordered an armed squad of members to stop them from leaving by any means necessary - which ultimately ended in gunfire - and the deaths of five people, including Ryan; eleven others were wounded in the attack.
Back on the compound, Jones was ordering his members to commit “revolutionary suicide,” an act they had symbolically rehearsed in a ritual he called The White Night. Parents were forced to serve their children “grape drink” laced with cyanide, and then drink it themselves. Jones died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, too horrified to face the suffering he inflicted on those he had promised to protect. In all, more than 900 people died that day. One of the first responders to the scene described the aerial view as the helicopter approached as looking like “the quilt of the dead.”
'QUILT OF THE DEAD' - ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION
CULT SERIES [JONESTOWN]
