Pastor Norwood Fights to Save Jonestown Innocent Children Base Headquarters - A 32-Year Sanctuary
Pastor Norwood Fights to Save Jonestown Innocent Children Base Headquarters - A 32-Year Sanctuary
By Dr. Barbara Reynolds and Dr. Jynona Norwood
For 32 years, the Base Headquarters of the Annual Jonestown Cherishing the Innocent Children and Hero Families Memorial and Wall has stood as a sanctuary of truth, prayer, and remembrance. Pastor Jynona Norwood designed the only memorial on earth dedicated solely to the 305 innocent children who entered Jonestown one way and had no way out.
The memorial — designed, built, and painstakingly assembled through decades of archived photographs, family stories, and community testimony — was born out of a vow to restore the children’s identities, faces, and humanity after Jim Jones’s deception, coercion, and violence stole their lives. This portable memorial is not simply a wall. It is a living archive, where the innocent children have been placed on their memorial and honored with dignity, without honoring their killer, standing in stark contrast to Evergreen Cemetery, which placed plaques honoring Jim Jones on the sacred final resting place of the 305 innocent children.
And now, the same spirit of threat that once destroyed their lives has resurfaced in a new form.
Today, in 2026, a new threat has emerged — not in the jungle, but in the courts. Attorney fees. Bookkeepers. Fabricated charges. Threats. Coercion. Bates stamped evidence documents the scheme in their own handwriting. Now they want the memorial headquarters — built with community, civil and religious leaders, Norwood’s tears, trauma, and vow. She calls it “an assault on the memory of the innocent children.”
As the legal battle intensified, memories of the original tragedy resurfaced with painful clarity. A few days after the massacre, the names began to scroll down NBC News. Norwood’s grandmother — once Jim Jones’s most dedicated supporter in San Francisco before she realized the truth — recognized the names of her daughter, grandchildren, cousins, and loved ones as they appeared on the screen. She screamed in pain as the reality became undeniable.
Norwood said they did not commit suicide. And her grandmother cried beside her, identifying each loved one through her tears and grief as Norwood wrote down every name in real time.
Long before the world understood Jonestown, Norwood was already fighting. Jones’s first Black member in San Francisco was her grandmother — a woman who believed deeply in God, attended COGIC, and embraced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of equal pay, racial harmony, justice, and opportunity.
Jim Jones monopolized on that dream. And when everyone believed in Jones’s promises, Norwood saw danger. She was never a member of Peoples Temple. She was a daughter, granddaughter, niece, and mother trying to rescue her family from a man who promised equality but delivered terror.
One day, Peoples Temple members tried to block her exit when she came to take her young son. “My mother and grandmother were pulling my son’s body one way,” she recalls, “and I was pulling him the other way. I pulled him out of their grip.”
Jim Jones — in the dark glasses he never removed — ran toward her. They stood toe to toe. She did not back down. She took her son and left. Her son, Rev. Ed Norwood, remembers: “My mother fought for me with everything she had. She saved my life.”
Years later, federal forensic pathologist, Dr. Leslie Mootoo, confirmed what Norwood had said from the beginning: No one committed suicide — it was murder. Families were injected between their shoulder blades, others injected in the backs of their arms where they could not reach, many were shot, and survivors were told, “Drink — or be shot.”
Gunmen surrounded the pavilion.
The silent screams of the innocent children still echo through every detail of the forensic record. And in 2026, those echoes collide with a nation facing its own crisis of missing and exploited children.
Across the United States, headlines report unprecedented numbers of children disappearing from foster systems, youth shelters, group homes, and urban neighborhoods. National databases show tens of thousands of open missing child cases, while investigative reports reveal children vanishing from overwhelmed state agencies, unregulated residential programs, and understaffed protective custody systems.
Families plead for answers as social media rumors, conspiracy theories, and political agendas drown out verified information. Law enforcement officials warn that trafficking networks are exploiting gaps in state oversight, while advocacy groups argue that the nation is experiencing a child safety emergency hidden beneath bureaucratic language and political noise. The same forces that once allowed Jim Jones to manipulate truth — confusion, fear, and deliberate distortion — now shape the national conversation about whose children are protected, whose stories are believed, and whose suffering is ignored.
Decades after the massacre, the nation witnessed a moment of healing and remembrance when Yolanda Renée King — the granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — stood with the families at the 40th Anniversary. Her father, Martin Luther King III, the keynote speaker, joined Norwood, Rev. Ed Norwood, and community leaders in unveiling the Portable Memorial displaying the children’s full color photographs, names, and ages.
The highest offices of our nation, together with America’s foremost civil rights and religious leaders, have spoken with one voice to affirm the sacred importance of this work and this dignified memorial.
• Vice President Kamala Harris stated: “As we honor the legacy of those who lost their lives, we must continue to fight for a future free from violence, hate, and fear.”
• Congresswoman Barbara Lee wrote: “I support your efforts. Thank you for all of the work you are doing to create this Memorial.”
• Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown declared: “Norwood’s memorial ensures the innocent children will never be forgotten.”
• Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds warns that dismantling the Base Headquarters would be “an act of historical desecration.”
• Ambassador Rev. Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. calls the attempt to seize the headquarters “a moral crisis for the nation.”
“Jonestown didn’t end in the jungle,” Norwood says. “It reverberates in 2026 — in courtrooms, in public records battles, in the fight against disinformation, and in the families who still live with the silence of never receiving a phone call before watching their loved ones’ names scroll across a TV screen.” She adds, “I will not allow the innocent children’s memory — nor my family, friends, and heroes who were massacred — to be pushed aside, rewritten, or forgotten.”
The case will be heard on June 18, 2026 at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse - Third Floor - Los Angeles, Dept. 20 - 8:30 am. Contact: Pastor Jynona Norwood — 650 888 0377 Website: www.jonestownofficialmemorial.org
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