Thirty years ago on Monday Nov. 20th the S.F. Chronicle reported that hundreds of followers of Jim Jones had died with him in Jonestown, Guyana. A week later on Monday the 27th Dan White killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The current S.F. Chronicle has an excellent summary of the events.
I knew nearly all the participants; some
well, some like Jim Jones, fairly well. I was dating the Supervisor Dan
White searched out to murder. The one part of the story that the
Chronicle writer, Susan Sward, is unable to write about is the direct
connection between the two events, Jonestown and the City Hall
murders. I am a personal witness to that connection.
I was business manager of Glide Memorial Church at the time. Glide was a center of many communities, including the mixed black/white community of which Jim Jones' community had been a part.
Every morning beginning Monday the 20th, with the news of a few hundred deaths, the number of deaths reported in the press grew daily, reaching the staggering number of 909 by Friday. The cumulative effect was electrifying. The psychological frenzy of the San Francisco population was palpable.
I
was so disturbed, as were the rest of the staff at Glide, by the
hysteria we saw around us, that I called a meeting on Friday the 24th
with the key staff to put in place a protection plan for the upcoming two Sunday
the 26th religious services. We doubled the number of trained
plainclothes staffers we had available to mix with the crowd, we
searched the building twice before the services for bombs and weapons; most
importantly we placed two security staffers on the roof of the
building, with binoculars and walkie-talkies to carefully observe
everything happening below. We had never been this cautious before. We
were truly scared of the precarious mood of the crowd we were dealing
with.
That was the same Sunday that Dan White met with Mayor George Moscone to ask for his reinstatement to the Board of Supervisors and was rejected.
Dan White responded to a mood of hysteria that engulfed him, in addition to his personal motives.
There is much more to report. There are many aspects of this history that I experienced and have not reported. I will save that for another day another time and several more blogs.
