On November 18, 1978, Harold Cordell had to make a decision that few could ever fathom: leave behind his family and save his life or join them in committing suicide. He was a member of the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, also known as “Jonestown,” and at that moment, it was all unraveling. Defectors were gathering their possessions to leave.

Cordell turned to his fourteen-year-old son James, known to the local community as “Jim Stalin.” “Come on, Jimmy, let’s get out of here,” Harold said. “We gotta go.” But his son refused. James would die a few hours later after ingesting cyanide, along with more than nine hundred others.

Peoples Temple was founded in Indianapolis in 1954 as a church committed to racial integration and social justice. The group moved to California’s Redwood Valley in 1965 and increasingly embraced a socialist worldview. By the 1970s, the organization had grown to thousands of members, concentrated in California’s urban centers, and was headquartered in San Francisco. Pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninism became its guiding philosophy. In 1974, Peoples Temple purchased and began settling a plot of land in the jungles of northwest Guyana, commonly referred to as “Jonestown.” Large-scale migration of adherents to Guyana began in 1977 and continued until their demise in November 1978.