Jones has been popularly portrayed as a tyrant. Someone who subjugated his community - creating a town of zombies.
 
Those that knew him portray him in a different light - though no less contradictory. Crucial to understanding his character is the development of The Peoples Temple. As the community plunged into crisis, real or imagined, Jones' state of mind appears to have become increasingly unstable and extreme.
 
This short profile focusses on observations made about him in the early to mid seventies during the rise of the Temple in Redwood Valley, California and then later in San Francisco. Jones was rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with in local politics. At that time he was a respected, charismatic leader. Regarded as a humanitarian, whose mission helps to re house the homeless, addicts, and other alienated americans:
 

Jim Jones was born on 13 May 1931 in Indianapolis, Indiana to a poor family.
 
The Peoples Temple was originally founded as The Wings of Deliverance in 1955 by Jim Jones, and by 1960 the Temple was a affiliated to a liberal Protestant denomination in Indianapolis. Jones had been ordained as a minister and the Temple preached a doctrine of racial equality (which was unusual, if not radical at the time). Jones was also a committed communist and preached socialist - anti capitalist ideology. The congregation was racially mixed and many of its members originated from the poor and North American underclass.
 
In 1965 the Temple moved to California where it could pursue its theology of racial equality un hindered by a suspicious non liberal public. Then in 1972 it expanded with another congregation based in San Francisco, where entangled in local politics its public image was destroyed by the press. Many commentators have speculated that as a new religious movement with unorthodox and apparently radical beliefs it faced a hostile reaction typical of the fate of so many similar marginal belief groups.
 
By 1977 the Peoples Temple had purchased land in Guyana, a socialist country that enjoyed US support. The land was used as an Agricultural Mission, and occupied by approximately fifty Temple members. The same year the IRS (Inland Revenue Service) began to pursue the Temple for tax evasion. It was at this point that Jones decide to urge the whole community to move to Guyana, the promised land.
 
Jones was known as Dad, or Father in The Temple.
 
Meeting him after a sermon for the first time Deborah Layton describes Jones as having a compassionate manner. Giving the appearance that he was someone who could be trusted, clean and radiant - Someone who took the time to talk to whoever needed to talk to him.
 
Layton describes how within a few minutes she wanted to scream "Yes I love you".
 
Survivor Odell Rhodes recalls, "he was so tuned into people, he could look at you, and he'd always have a pretty good idea of what you were up to, so maybe he could just guess about what was likely to be bothering you. I don't know, but if that wasn't it, I'd hate to think what the hell else it could have been." At another time he says of this uncanny trait "I damned near thought I must have been talking to the devil".