Editor’s note: The following article is part one 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.

In October 1946, near the end of a 33-day cross-country trip from Massachusetts to California, the prominent Boston blue blood couple of Alfred and Elizabeth Ingalls stopped over in Berkeley, California, to visit their daughter, Helen Ingalls Roberts, and her husband, Dr. Richard M. Roberts, a research chemist.

It was in the Ingalls’ expensive new car parked near their apartment that Helen was appalled to find the Ingalls’ maid, 57-year-old Dora L. Jones, an African-American woman she had known since childhood, asleep, shabbily dressed and crammed in with the luggage, her ankles swollen, her abnormally thin, diminutive body exhausted by the long drive. It had been a drive marred by the Ingalls’ insistence that Dora sleep in bathtubs or in their sedan parked near motels.

Years of pent up guilt and anguish immediately surfaced in Helen who now summoned the courage to expose her parent’s decades-long cruel exploitation of Dora to state and federal authorities, prompting outrage and grabbing the attention of the nation’s newsprint media, including the Associated Press, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, and Time magazine.

The sensational legal battle that resulted uncovered adultery, abortion, deception, family dysfunction, and, above all, unrelenting vengeance.

Witnesses were brought in from 3,000 miles away and a riot outside the courtroom was narrowly averted. The trial and landmark verdict reached in San Diego added another disturbing race-related entry in the annals of American jurisprudence, the first legal case of its kind since 1880, and drew from the shadows the uncomfortable fact of the nation’s slavery past.

Interviewed by the Berkeley police, the Ingalls were imperious, clever, and convincing in denying insinuations of mistreatment and bondage claimed by their daughter. The previous evening Helen was told her inheritance was in jeopardy and so was her husband’s employment if she pressed the matter.

The Ingalls characterized her daughter’s attempt to rescue Dora as a kidnapping. Turning to Dora, Elizabeth reminded her of her lack of intelligence, her diabetes that needed monitoring, and doubled down on veiled threats with the cryptic remark: “I will take care of you … others will not do so. Besides, you are a criminal. You know and I know what I refer to.”

Timid, speaking in whispers, and desperate to accommodate everyone, Dora was unaccustomed to defending herself and did not contradict the Ingalls’ version of events.

The Berkeley police permitted the Ingalls and Dora to proceed together south to their final destination, the charming, upscale coastal resort city of Coronado, across the bay from downtown San Diego. A one-month stay at the historic Hotel del Coronado did not include Dora, who was forced to sleep on the beach.

Meanwhile, an unnamed third party who had heard Helen’s complaint against her parents, which amounted to modern-day slavery, communicated details to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which gathered sufficient evidence, specifically violation of her civil rights as delineated in the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, to arrest the Ingalls on February 25, 1947, at their newly purchased two story retirement home at 911 A Avenue.

Held overnight in County Jail, they were released on $2,500 bonds the following day while Dora was taken into protective custody by the FBI to be called upon later in court as a material witness. A federal grand jury in Los Angeles returned an indictment in late March.

Charged with having transported Dora within the state of California with the intent of holding her as a slave, the Ingalls’ trial in Federal Court commenced in San Diego on June 24. Both Alfred, age 64, and Elizabeth, age 62, pled innocent.

The accursed and the accused

Dora Jones, born Theodora Lawrence Jones in 1890 in Athens, Alabama, was one of nine children of former slaves Plato and Lizzie Jones.

A bright child who grew to enjoy singing and playing the piano, Dora was noticed by Elizabeth Ingalls (née Myra Elizabeth Kimball) when the latter taught at Trinity Mission School in Athens, circa 1905.

In 1907, Elizabeth, a graduate of Simmons College, married Walter P. Harman, a Harvard classmate of Franklin D. Roosevelt who worked as a government clerk. She gave birth to her first daughter, Ruth, in Washington, D.C.

She sent for Dora, then her admired protégée, to be her housemaid and nanny. But husband Walter desired more than scrubbed floors and pressed shirts from the teenager. He seduced and impregnated Dora who volunteered particulars of their affair to Elizabeth.

Rather than returning Dora to Alabama to have the baby as the Ingalls’ family doctor recommended, Elizabeth insisted on an abortion which she personally arranged.

The situation worsened when Elizabeth suffered a miscarriage and blamed it on an argument she had with Dora, thereafter accusing her of being both an adulteress and a murderer of two babies which assuredly condemned her to hell.

Elizabeth, a descendant of colonial Massachusetts Gov. William Bradford, still had options after her divorce from Walter. One that she exercised in 1918 was to marry Alfred Wesley Ingalls, son of a factory owner, descendant of the founder of Lynn, Massachusetts, graduate of Brown University, and future military officer and attorney who was elected to serve as a representative to the Massachusetts state Legislature.

Helen was born that same year and by all measures life appeared good for the family of four. But Alfred was also complicit in his wife’s mistreatment of Dora and their daughters grew up observing their parent’s interaction with her; it was the family secret that permanently emotionally distanced children from parents.

In Elizabeth’s mind her erstwhile protégée had betrayed her in the worst possible manner, something she could never forgive or forget. Dora had to be made to pay for her treachery and regularly reminded of it.

See part two 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.