Annie Dawid
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Annie Dawid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And when the guards and everyone else goes to make sure everybody's out of the dorms, they don't see her. And she does. She sleeps through it. Another older man runs and hides in a ditch. Two younger African-American men manage to escape while it's happening. And earlier in the day, before anything happened,
A whole group, a family group, a bunch of kids and a few parents, they say, oh, we're going to have a picnic. I mean, this is completely unheard of, this sort of behavior. But because the congressman is there and the media are there, they figure they can get away with stuff they wouldn't normally get away with. And they walked out.
Yeah, he's still alive. And he served time in prison in Guyana. And then when he's brought back to the States, he served some time in the States. And he was released, I think, in the early 2000s. He actually didn't kill anybody. He injured some people on the plane, but he didn't kill the congressman.
He didn't kill anybody out on the airstrip because he was in the little plane and shot a couple of people in the little plane, but did not kill them. So it's another of the great ironies.
Yes, that's correct.
Well, yeah, it was just everything got swallowed up by the jungle. And the Guyanese government, I mean, they were furious. And the way I see it is there's another brand of colonization where these foreigners come to their country. and make this horrible spectacle.
And then for many decades after that, if you said Guyana, the next thing was, oh, isn't where all those crazy Americans killed themselves. So this brand new independent country comes to be known for this horrible tragedy.
Yes.
Yes, it is a very depressing story. I'm a realist and I like looking at reality. parts of American history that are forgotten and to bring to light what has been left in the shadows. And what has been left in the shadows is 917 people who died that day who were not Jim Jones. Almost all of the attention has been on the man, you know, more feeding his eagle after his death.
And I wanted to study the other people
Okay. Jim Jones was born to a kind of poor white family in Indiana and grew up in as a kind of outcast in a small town. He was an only child. His father was a World War I veteran who had been damaged by mustard gas and didn't work and drank too much. His mother, unusually for the times, worked and she was a union woman. And while I find that very admirable, it was a point of
ridicule for classmates of Jim Jones. So he was kind of a weirdo. His father was not looking after him. So he was on his own most of the time. His family was not religious, but in his loneliness, he ended up catching the attention of a neighbor woman who started taking him to her church, which was Pentecostal. So that was the beginning of his life, kind of finding a home in churches.
He did this growing up. And at a certain point, he ended up still a teenager working as a hospital aide at a hospital in Richmond, Indiana. which was a very segregated city. So we're talking the 1940s here. And as a kind of outcast himself, I think he felt a kind of resonance with African-American citizens who were constantly kicked to the curb. And and he saw that in the hospital as well.
So there he met the nurse, Marceline Baldwin, who was a minister's daughter. I think they were both very inexperienced in the ways of love and romance, and they got married very quickly. Marceline was very altruistic, and Jim Jones was very altruistic. And so He was going to school and also deciding that a minister was what he needed to be.
And she, as a minister's daughter, was completely supportive of that. And they started their first churches in the 1950s in Indiana. And there was more than one, which is why I say churches, and they changed names as well. There was Community Unity Church. and there was Wings of Deliverance, and eventually there was People's Temple.
Yes, exactly. They start adopting across racial lines, which also was not done in the 50s. So they were the first... white family to adopt an African-American child. And he was given the name Jim Jones Jr., which is interesting. They had one natural child, Stephen, and there were five or six adopted ones.
So they were doing all these good works in Indiana, and she's still working as a full-time nurse. She was integral to the functioning of this church, both financial and otherwise. He was kind of the bad father that people looked up to for approval, and she was more the accepting mother. And eventually they went by those terms, father and mother.
Yes, exactly. And of course, it's not unusual for a religious man to be called father, as is done in the Catholic Church and other churches as well. But she also becomes Mother Marceline. And in some ways, in my research, I felt like she has developed this kind of saintly image, which is in a certain way just as dehumanizing as Jim Jones's monster image.
You know, I've been trying to deconstruct those stereotypes with my work.
Yeah, I actually wouldn't call it new age because now as we start moving into the 70s, the political aspect is what rises to the surface and what ends up. So he starts out with like poor working class blacks and whites. In the early 60s, he decides he's going to move them to California, Northern California. And the reason for that is twofold.
Showing 41–60 of 147 · page 3 of 8
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