Pamela with Irene Carter

Irene Moore Carter was born in Wichita Falls, Texas on November 7, 1923.  She was raised in Dallas and moved to California at age 16.  She began her adult life working in the Richmond Shipyards as a welder.  Today, Irene is known affectionately as "Sister Carter."  She has belonged to the Church of the Good Shepherd (Baptist) for 53 years and serves as the most senior Mother of the Church. Attorney Price met her there as a young single mother in 1982 while she was preparing to take the California bar.  Irene and her husband John were Attorney Price's very first clients.

Irene was married to John C. Carter for sixty-four (64) years before he passed away in 2008.  Irene is a proud survivor of breast cancer.  At age 88, she has 5 children, 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.  She has hosted "family day" once a week on Tuesday nights for more than 46 years.  Every Tuesday, she cooks dinner for her children and grandchildren at the family home in Oakland.  Anyone who knows the Carter family knows where they can get a good meal on Tuesday nights.

Irene is an ardent supporter of President Barack Obama and believes that people do not give him nearly enough credit for the things that he has done.  She follows politics very closely.  She also believes that President Obama's current position on gay marriage is the right one.

Irene's advice to young women is "Be a lady first! Get an education before you start looking for a job.  If you have to start work, go to school part-time.  Be determined to stick with it, and when it gets hard, think about what is your goal.  You can't give up.  Sometimes you have to create your own job, but you need a job to support yourself."  She continues to support Price And Associates in all of its endeavors.

Ida B. eventually became a reporter and part-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and wrote frequently about racial injustice, often focusing on issues involving the school system which still employed her.  Eventually, her teaching contract was not renewed.  She began focusing on lynching which was a regular practice at the time, and even endorsed violence as a means of self-protection.  She carried her own pistol for self-defense.  In 1892, after Ida B. denounced the lynching of three black businessmen and called for an economic boycott of white-owned businesses as well as the segregated public transportation system, the white community became incensed at her.  A mob invaded her paper's office and destroyed the presses.  She was out of town and immediately relocated herself to New York where she called herself a "journalist in exile."

Ida B. traveled throughout the United States and overseas to Britain and France speaking out against lynching.  She settled in Chicago, where she worked with Frederick Douglass and a local lawyer and editor, Frederick Barnett.  She soon married Barnett and they had four children together.  She helped raise his two children from his first marriage.  She also wrote for his newspaper, the Chicago Conservator.  In 1895, she published the Red Record, a documentation of racially-motivated lynchings in the United States.  

Ida B. was a founding member of the NAACP in 1909, but later withdrew her membership because she believed the organization was not being militant enough.  In her writings and lectures, she often criticized middle-class blacks, including ministers, for not being active enough in helping poorer members of the black community.  She worked with the Negro Fellowship League for ten years helping African-Americans newly arrived from the South to settle in Chicago.  She worked for women's rights as well with leaders in the women's suffrage movement.  She continued to be active in the community as well as state and national politics until her death in 1931.  Her own autobiography, Crusade for Justice, was published in 1970, edited by her daughter, Alfreda M. Wells-Barnett.

Attorneys Price and Farrise led a lively discussion with the group of mostly high school students on the current state of American jurisprudence, where the right to legitimate redress for wrongs committed remains under heavy attack.  The civil justice system is the one and only place where an average citizen can go toe to toe with those with money and power and still have a shot at justice.  Price and Farrise firmly believe and hope that HOT COFFEE has the potential, with the right funding and effort, to really change the way people think about our civil justice system and access to the courts.  Kudos to CABL and the Farrise Law Firm for sponsoring this insightful film. 

Pamela and Simona with a potential future California SuperLawyer