About two hundred persons are expected to attend the dedication ceremony of the Oakland, California memorial to the victims of the Jonestown mass suicide, according to the Oakland Tribune.
The memorial is in the form of four granite plaques embedded on a raised concrete slab- in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery. It bears the names in alphabetical order of all 918 persons who died in the tragic Jonestown incident at Port Kaituma on November 18, 1978.
The memorial site comes some 33 years after the tragedy and it also bears the name of the Rev. Jim Jones, who masterminded it, according to the Oakland Tribune.
According to the newspaper the new plaques will be officially unveiled at a private dedication ceremony on May 29 and they were described as a long-awaited tangible tribute to all the victims. The report said of the dead, 409 unclaimed bodies were buried in a mass grave in Evergreen, and many of their names were not known until the past couple of years, according to Fielding McGehee of the Jonestown Institute in San Diego, part of the group that raised money for the memorial project.
And while the inclusion of Jones’ name has angered some victims’ families and those who had proposed another memorial, the newspaper said that organisers of the now-standing markers say they wanted to present a complete historic picture of the tragic events.
“The decision to put (Jim Jones’) name on the list was discussed, and we talked to a lot of people about it,” said John Cobb, of Oakland, who grew up in Jones’ Peoples Temple religious sect and lost his mother in the mass suicide.
“But we decided that this is a memorial for historical purposes, listing everyone who died there,” he said. “There’s no side note saying Jones was the leader or anything special about him. He’s just on the list. I’m sure people will have their feelings about his name being there, but we wanted to tell the story of what happened. This is not meant as a judgment stone,” the man further said in the report.
The report said that for many relatives of those who died, Jonestown remains a never-ending saga as they recall how Jones led followers to his communal compound in Guyana, promising a utopian community. On that November day in 1978, US congressman Leo Ryan and others intending to investigate the compound were killed by Jones’ associates after landing at a nearby airport. Those in the compound were then forced to drink cyanide-laced Koolaid at Jones’ command.
At the new memorial site, the four plaques have been placed next to the original memorial marker erected in 1979 by the Guyana Emergency Relief Committee at Evergreen, and surrounding landscaping continues this week. The new memorial was funded through private donations raised by the Jonestown Memorial Fund.
More than 120 people — former members of the People’s Temple, as well as relatives of those who died in Guyana — contributed more than US$20,000 in less than two months to pay for the new plaques.
Evergreen Cemetery donated an equal amount in labour and material to the effort, McGehee said.
