Jim Warren Jones was born in Randolph County, Indiana. His father James Jones was a World War I veteran and his mother Lynetta Putnam. She had believed she had given birth to a messiah. When Jones was a child, during the Depression, he and his parents moved into a small shack without plumbing, due to poverty. When Jones was a child he read a lot because he had no money or friends to entertain him, so he studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler. Studying powerful communists, he noted their strengths and weaknesses. Jones also took an interest in religion; it was a way for him to feel happy, since he didn't have many friends. Jim was called a "weird boy" obsessed with religion and death. It was claimed he would hold funerals for small animals on his property and that he had stabbed a cat to death. Jim began to develop his own opinions as he grew up, while his father was an alcoholic in the Ku Klux Klan, Jim was sympathetic to the African American community, probably because he was an outcast as a child and knew how it felt to be left out. One day Jim brought home a friend, who was an African American, but his father refused to let him into the house and they argued over the issue of race. After this incident, Jim did not speak to his father for many years, and his parents eventually separated, and he moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana, graduating from Richmond High School. After high school, Jim moved to Bloomington and attended Indiana University – Bloomington, where he saw Eleanor Roosevelt give a speech about African Americans. Jones married his wife Marceline in 1949 during his freshman year of college. When Jones, a...... middle of paper......, dedicated his "power" to civil rights instead of communism. He could have been right next to MLK in the story, had a decent sized following, and could have done some really good things, but instead of seeing him as an influential person, we see him as a selfish, controlling deviant. “Jim Jones,” the Biography Channel website; 2014 [cited April 1, 2014] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/jim-jones-10367607.History.com Staff. “Jonestown – Facts and Summary – HISTORY.com.” History. A+E Networks, 2010. Web. April 1, 2014.Crawford-Mason, Clare, Dolly Langdon, Melba Beals, Nancy Faber, and Diana Waggoner. “The Legacy of Jonestown: A Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions.” People Magazine November 12, 1979: 36+. Network. April 1, 2014. Steel, Fiona. "Jonestown Massacre: A 'Reason' to Die." Crime Library. Ed. Andy Brooks. Np, nd Web. April 1. 2014.
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