Tag: Black Paradise”

Could massive internal displacement today rewire the Jonestown of yesterday? Wanda Sabir offers an up-close narrative of the MoAD-hosted reading and discussion with Dr. James L. Taylor, playwright Sikivu Hutchinson Ph.D., audience and cast of the play “White Nights, Black Paradise,” dissecting the Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple phenomenon.

Seventy-five percent of the membership of Peoples Temple was African American, and the majority of those who died in Jonestown were African American women. The Jonestown victims have been demonized and marginalized – stripped of agency and, in many respects, humanity. The settlement was envisioned – and promoted – as a kind of “Promised Land,” a racial utopia and antidote to the white supremacist violence and dehumanization Black people experienced in the U.S.