Biography
Byron Mark Baer, later a New Jersey state senator, was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on July 29, 1961, for participating in the Freedom Rides and challenging segregation in interstate transportation — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, the participation, and the individually identified police photograph, but not the court disposition, any transfer to Parchman, or the physical release date; those fields are unresolved pending county-jail, court, or penitentiary records.
He and the other arrested riders were tried in Jackson Municipal Court on July 31, and archival and biographical sources report that he served forty-five days at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Farm; the exact admission and discharge dates are unresolved.
He spent 45 days in Mississippi custody after the July 29, 1961 arrest, including imprisonment at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where Rick Sheviakov was one of his cellmates. His prison correspondence survives in the archive, along with the communication codes the riders used and a letter written on toilet paper.
No imprisonment figure is published for him. The admission and discharge dates are unresolved, and 45 days is neither a pair of dates nor a whole number of months — the two forms this archive stores. Rounding it to one month or two would publish a figure the source does not support, so the 45 days stays here in the text where it is exact.
