Rare Jonestown Survivor Interview Odell Rhodes 1978
Odell Rhodes died in 2014 at the age of 72 in Sacramento, CA. RIP
There are people who are walking among us today, who would’ve been on the ground in Jones’ town. Stay mentally strong folks.
My parents were an interracial couple (white mom from the midwest, black father from the deep south) and we lived in Frisco back when People’s Temple was still seen as a positive thing by a lot of people. My mother was drawn to the church’s diversity and talked my father, who was always deeply suspicious of religion, to go one weekend. I was 4 years old so my memories are spotty but I remember them locking the doors and Jim Jones going on an hours long spiel, alternating from preaching to raving about the evils of capitalism and religion and the virtue of Marxism. Nobody went to the bathroom. Nobody spoke except to cheer him on. When we left my dad told my mom, “We are never coming back here. That cat is gone (my dad’s expression for someone being crazy)”.
