Byron Baer, Hilmar Pabel, Catherine Prensky, Sally Rowley, Judith Scroggins Rick Sheviakov, Woollcott Smith, Ellen Ziskind.
Byron Baer was a television and movie special effects technician. And a brain who'd attended Cornell University.
Before he went to Mississippi, he'd made a transistor radio.
"What's the big deal with that?." you say.
Well, he smuggled this homemade miniature radio into Parchman Prison. And it wasn't detected in the strip search.
That's right. It wasn't detected in his strip search.
Reportedly, an earpiece, transistor circuits, a 20-foot-long super thin aerial wire, and a hearing aid battery were all placed in an oblong piece of plastic and placed...inside two condoms.
Baer is just one of many Freedom Riders with an impressive resume. He attended New York, Columbia, and Cornell Universities. His time in movie and TV special effects was short, but in his later years he served as a legislator for the state of New Jersey. He served as a member of the New Jersey General Assembly twice -- 1972-1974 and 1974-1994 -- and as a Senator from 1994-2005.
He and Woollcott Smith found a rather comical way to use the miniature radio unnoticed. You'll find that in Breach of Peace by Eric Etheridge (Vanderbilt, 2018). A quick-and-easy-to-read book that's well worth the purchase, borrow, or inter-library loan.
Illinois Central Train Station, July 30, 1961, New Orleans, LA, to Jackson, MS (ride 47)
Albert Barouh, Winston Fuller, Joseph Gerbac, Michael Grubbs, Alan Kaufman, William Leons, Herbert Mann, Max Pavesic, Philip Posner, Helen Singleton, Robert Singleton, Richard Steward, Lonnie Thurman, Sam Joe Townsend, Tanya Wren.
I love Helen Singleton's mugshot (second image, third row). It has a look I like to caption. "Go ahead. Underestimate me. This is gonna be fun." Or maybe, "That's okay. I'm already having the last laugh." Or, "justice is coming, mister. And won't you be surprised when it gets here." I know you can come up with fitting statements of your own (and I'd sure love to read them, so don't be shy).
Helen's husband, Robert (third image, third row), was on the same ride. He was the head of the NAACP at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). At the time, Helen was a freshman at Santa Monica College.
After the rides, she got her bachelor's degree in fine arts as a transfer student at UCLA and, later, earned a master's in public administration from Loyola.
Helen then went back to UCLA. But this time to do instrumental work in course and program development. Later, she would work as a consultant for the L.A. County Museum of Art and various arts organizations. No slouches either of them.
If you read her commentary in Breach of Peace (Etheridge, 2018) , you'll get to see what her, shall we say, confident mug shot was likely motivated by.
William Leons (second image, second row), born and raised in the Netherlands, was a Jew, like many of the Freedom Riders. He was the son of World War II Resistance activists.
In 1942, his father was arrested, taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and was executed there. His mother, who was arrested the following year and taken to Vught concentration camp, was fortunate to be liberated at the end of the war. After living in hiding, Leons was reunited with his mother. They emigrated to the U.S. several years later.
Listen to what one rider had to say about his motivation for taking the ride in this 1961 KTLA interview.