Editor’s note: The following article is part three of a four-part series about Athens native Dora Jones and the trial of Alfred and Elizabeth Ingalls in San Diego, California. The Ingalls were an affluent white couple accused of mistreating Jones, who worked for them. The article was originally published in the March 15 edition of the San Diego Reader and was written by Robert Fikes Jr., a librarian at San Diego University.

At the close of court session the black newsmen from the Los Angeles Sentinel interviewed the Ingalls’ defense attorney Clifford K. Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Ingalls.

In citing her diary as containing proof of her noble intentions, Ingalls offered, “All my life I have been a true friend to the Negro people. . . . I only regret that on the advice of my counsel I am unable to permit the Sentinel to publish the true facts.”

The week ended with the first questioning of Dora herself who cried while describing hardships she endured in the homes of the Ingalls. In particular, she underscored Elizabeth’s insistence she have an abortion when apprised of the affair with Walter Harman (initially she lied to Elizabeth blaming the milkman for her pregnancy); that she was told she had the mentality of a 12-year-old; and that she deserved to be in an insane asylum.

Responsible for serving distinguished guests like Massachusetts Gov. (later U.S. Senator) Leverette Saltonstall, she was never given a day off from working 4 a.m to 10 p.m. and was not allowed to eat or sit in the presence of the Ingalls. She had not seen a movie in more than 20 years, i.e., she had never seen a movie with sound.

She cooked meals for them, did their laundry, dusting, child care, gardening, and even shoveled snow, washed and polished the Packard and pushed it when it was disabled.

She was lead to believe the reason she was not being paid for her labors was because money for her was being deposited in two bank accounts and that stocks had been purchased in her name, neither of which she ever drew money from.

“(I) never held the money they paid me in my hand,” she stated.

Still guilt-ridden about the decades old indiscretion, when cross-examined Dora said she felt she owed her life to her tormentor. There were, however, times when Elizabeth acted humanely toward her: “… often little chats we had in her room when (Elizabeth) would become angry, call me an adulteress and murderer, and tell me I could go to jail,” she recounted. “Sometimes I thought I’d rather go to jail.”

Questioned by Assistant U.S. Attorney Betty M. Graydon, Dora had earlier testified: “. . .(Elizabeth) told me that church was no place for a person who had done what I had done. She said that I would pollute the people around me. She said I couldn’t go to the movies because it was dark in the theater and that was no place for a girl like me.”

The defense countered with a female character witness for the Ingalls, a tenant in one of their Boston properties, who swore she heard Dora say she did not need money, implying all of her worldly needs were being met at the Ingalls’ Beacon Hill residence where U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once lived.

The woman added that when the Ingalls’ daughters married they each invited Dora to come work for them as a paid housemaid but that she indicated she was content to remain with Elizabeth and Alfred.

At the beginning of the third week of trial Dora, over the objection of defense counsel, was permitted by Judge Jacob Weinberger to display to the jury her deformed hands caused by decades of hard work and, in relating how Elizabeth would provoke arguments and disparage her work and intelligence, she broke down sobbing, necessitating a brief recess.

San Diego psychiatrist Dr. Harold O. Cozby, a prosecution witness, attributed Dora’s passivity and acceptance of her condition under the Ingalls in part to having been plucked from semi-rural Alabama at a youthful age and relocated in urban metropolises lacking a lifeline to home or to others who might extricate her from a bad situation.

“From that time (forward) she was subjected to authority as a maid,” he said, “and acquired an attitude of submission and dependence.”

Witness Vivian C. Nelson, a resident of Coronado and a neighbor of the Ingalls, testified to having observed Dora collecting driftwood along the shore between 6 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. and hauling it in a wheelbarrow to the Ingalls new home.

Elizabeth Ingalls speaks

On July 11, Elizabeth took the stand. According to her, she paid Dora for one year only, from 1907 to 1908 when she was in Washington, D.C., as her housemaid, but that she ceased paying her because her then husband, Walter Harman, needed all the money the family could scrape together to attend law school at Georgetown University, and that not only did Dora fully approve of this arrangement, she never accepted pay again.

Elizabeth, who said she had forgiven the affair Dora had with Walter, portrayed Dora as heartless because she occasionally mentioned the affair to bedevil her and quoted Dora as once saying: “You’re so very nice about everything. But Mr. Harman like(d) me better. I may be dirty but I’m what men like.”

She portrayed herself as a long-suffering, self-sacrificing, abused woman.

“(Dora) was just like one of us,” she explained. “I never considered her a servant or treated her like one.”

Concerning Dora’s innate abilities, Elizabeth contradicted herself on the witness stand. If one accepted her testimony at face value, Dora’s natural abilities devolved over time for she said that early on she “had great hopes for her becoming a leader of her race,” that she had dreamed of sending her to Howard University, but a few days later declared in court that as an adult Dora lacked basic competences to survive in a competitive society.

She also averred that “the reason Dora didn’t associate with Negroes was that Dora didn’t seem to like Negroes” and that she didn’t attend church because she “wasn’t interested in church.”

During the trial Dora stayed at the home of Logan Heights cleric the Rev. E. Major Shavers and was counseled by the Rev. Richard P. Harris, pastor of Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, both African-American men of faith.

Having earlier claimed Dora actually preferred sleeping in cars, later in the week on cross examination she admitted that during the stay at the Hotel Durant in Berkeley Dora was made to sleep in a hallway.

“She liked to sleep on the floor,” she contended, like the times when she had toothaches and felt the warm kitchen floor would bring her relief. Prosecutor Tolin pounced on this with sarcasm: “Since the slave in question had her teeth pulled in 1924, she hasn’t had trouble with her teeth for some time, has she?”

Wild accusations

Her calmness shattered by Tolin’s pointed queries, Elizabeth — whom he called “power mad” — began to exhibit signs of being unhinged. She had previously testified that Dora had a “heart of gold and never wanted anything for herself (whose) main desire was to help,” but now complained she was “very dishonest.”

She said her daughters, prosecution witnesses Helen I. Roberts of Berkeley and Ruth L. Castendyk of Chicago, had “been working behind my back for six years to do this to me.”

Called to the witness stand again at the start of the fourth week of trial, she lashed out at prosecuting attorney Tolin calling him “a Stalin” who depicted her family members as “monsters.” She was cautioned by Judge Weinberger to tone down her accusations.

Seemingly on the verge of hysteria, she blamed her daughters for all the recent trouble she and Alfred were experiencing, attacking Ruth as a “Nazi sympathizer” and upbraiding Helen for having been radicalized by “communistic” influences while a student at Radcliffe College. At wits end, she begged in vain to be allowed to meet with Dora face-to-face to straighten out everything.

During Alfred’s brief appearance on the stand he tried to account for why he had used Dora’s name to purchase industrial stock that was transferred to Elizabeth. He reasserted his wife’s contention that Dora never requested payment for her work.

He provided as evidence wills (impugned as “spurious and phony” by the prosecution) that guaranteed Dora with $15 per week for life upon the death of the Ingalls that were revoked when they were arrested; a joint bank account (Dora and Elizabeth) of $1,000 which Dora never used; and, stunningly, charged that Ruth’s Nazi sympathies prior to World War II had cost him reelection to the Massachusetts State Legislature, something that ran counter to the fact that during the war as an aviatrix in the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve she taught military flight (Air Corp) classes at the University of Missouri.

The canard about Ruth’s Nazi sympathies was probably imagined to seem plausible because she had made several trips to Germany, enjoyed its people and culture, had a German flag displayed in her bedroom and had been heard singing German songs with friends. There had never been any evidence, as the Ingalls suggested, that Ruth was ever a member of the subversive German American Bund.

At a grand jury hearing on March 19, 1947, she affirmed her liberal democratic values: “I believe in civil liberties, the equality of all peoples, and in good race relations”

See the conclusion of this story in Wednesday’s edition of The News Courier.

— Fikes was born and raised in Birmingham and graduated from Tuskegee University in 1970. He acquired graduate degrees in history and library science at the University of Minnesota, and retired this past January as a research librarian at San Diego State University.