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February 22, 1998 Asbury Park SUNDAY PRESS SECTION A STEVE BREEN'S VIEW The astronomical aspect (left) of the Monica Lewinsky case. C2 BOOKS Christian romance novels are making cash registers ring. C4 SENIORITY Sorting out fine points of Medicaid rules. C6 THE LYNCHING OF Governor scales new fiscal peak NGO JACK Gov. Whitman's recent budget speech, setting the stage for her new term, was clocked at faster than $32 million in new spending a minute, which was her personal best and may have put her in a position to achieve world-class status before she leaves office in 2002.

A $20 billion budget is now within her reach as her fiscal poli An ugly mob turned violent one cold March night in 1886 in Eatontown, acting as judge, jury and executioner after a 66-year-old black man was accused of raping a white woman. Compounding the tragedy the only recorded lynching in New Jersey history is the likelihood that the lynching victim was innocent. Stories by Kevin Coyne Staff Writer cies begin catching up to her liberal social views. Speaking for only 34 minutes before a packed chamber of lawmakers, cabinet offi )CRAX1 ADRIAN HEFFERN I FKECtlOLD, N. TlinRSDA-j, HiBCD 4, 3 the middle of a winter night when the moon and the stars were hidden, in a tiny brick jail on the banks of a frozen mill pond in Eatontown, a 66-year-old black man i sat alone and afraid in FRIGHTFUL CRIMES.il A CKOEL ASSAULT ttY A KEGBO.

Tin iuM oil MV ol KMStnlk 4 ttstt mi.MiHtt if elore4 4im l.tita, tntqMs knowo ta OPOH JP MB ImuiMHtHin. of Kt. Tmu A detective on the case JAMES J. CONNOUYStaff Photographer i- i' '1 'J 1 THEN AND NOW Mauro "Buzz" Baldanza (above), who has researched the lynching of Mingo Jack, stands at the site of the crime, near West Street in Eatontown. Mingo Jack was being held in a tiny brick jail (smaller building in photo at right) when a mob attacked him.

The lynching and a subsequent inquest that failed to determine who was responsible became a major media event. The Freehold-based Monmouth Democrat (above, right) denounced the lynching as a "cowardly assassination." So notorious was the lynching that an 1889 Monmouth County map (below, left) identified the site. Photo courtesy of GLENN VOGEL 1 1 m. -mm. 7 cers, lobby-, ists and other monetary experts, she outlined her plans for a $17.9 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, representing an increase of $1.1 billion, or 5.4 percent.

Judging from the news accounts, a good time was had by all, includ- ing her fellow Republicans. Someone counted 34 interruptions one a minute for applause, indicating she could have made even faster time if her aides had held up "no applause" signs. In addition, she paused in mid-speech to answer a prearranged telephone call from her daughter, Kate, by way of highlighting her proposal to eliminate the sales tax on regional calls within the state. She also had former Gov. Thomas H.

Kean put in a cameo appearance in connection with her plan to revive his popular "New Jersey and You Perfect Together" tourism slogan. This was maybe the first time a budget message was presented as a form of entertainment. There was no cameo appearance by Whitman's immediate predecessor, former Democratic Gov. James J. Florio, but she did invoke his spirit, noting that if his spending rate had been maintained, "the budget today would be $21 billion and you'd be paying $6 billion more in taxes." There was no mention of Kean, a Republican, having doubled the budget during his eight years in office.

Perhaps fearing that Whitman's plans might be misconstrued as signaling a return to Florioism, her staff has been busy spreading the word that she is personally responsible for only $300 million of the proposed new spending. The rest is being attributed to court orders for increased outlays on education and to spending mandates for programs enacted before she was first elected in 1993. The Wall Street Journal had an article last week quoting David Kehler, a deputy in the Department of the Treasury, as saying, "The important thing is the funding the state truly controls is going up 1.8 percent." (The implication that the other 3.6 percent of the proposed increase is out of control hardly seems reassuring, and may have revealed more about the state's budget process than Kehler intended.) I The same article cited Whitman, New York Gov. George Pataki and California Gov. Pete Wilson as ex-' amples of Republican governors whose new budgets make President 'Clinton's 3.9 percent spending in-' crease "look downright thrifty." The possibly ominous implication of one of Whitman's controllable initiatives has been overlooked.

This was her call for allocating $15 million for the construction of 200 miles of bicycle paths, the first step toward her goal of building 2,000 miles of bicycle paths over the next 10 years, if the next governor is willing to continue the program. Does she know something about the economy that no one else does? Does she foresee an end to the boom and everyone pedaling to work as a consequence? She also said she was putting some money aside for a rainy day. Maybe that's why she's still being called a Republican moderate. Adrian Heffern has been covering government and politics from Trenton since 1963. His column appears on Sundays.

1 .7 -Wis. his cell, listening helplessly to the angry, taunting voices of the men who had come to kill him. His name was Samuel Johnson, but he was widely known as Mingo Jack, after a fine racehorse he had groomed and ridden decades before. He had been locked up since supper time, when the town constable marched into his unpainted, two-room house to arrest him as a suspect in the rape of a white woman earlier that Friday afternoon, March 5, 1886. The news passed swiftly among the 1,000 or so villagers, and a steady parade of threats greeted the unguarded prisoner.

At 20 minutes before midnight, a pistol shot crashed through the glass on the barred transom window over the heavy wood-plank jail door. Then came a second bullet, and a third, and when the stalkers realized they couldn't shoot their quarry, they started battering the brick wall with a sledgehammer they had lifted from a neighboring marble-cutter's shop. The wall held, so they took a pickax and tried prying off the locked iron hasp that held the door shut. "Murder! Murder!" Johnson cried as the door gave way and he came face to face with the men who had appointed themselves his jurors, and his executioners. His pleas were heard by several neighbors and passers-by who cringed in silence the whites because they didn't want to challenge a mob, the blacks because they feared becoming its next victims.

Screams and groans followed, as Johnson was clubbed and beaten mercilessly. His blood smeared the walls, and the nails of his boot-heels scarred the pine-board floor as he struggled for his life. He was probably dead already his skull cracked, one eye gouged out by the time a rope was knotted around his neck and his body was hanged from the transom bars. Their sentence passed, the killers broke a hole in the ice and tried to wash their hands clean. A small boy on his way to trap muskrats found the body at dawn on Saturday, and the town awakened to confront the first and, as it turned out, the only lynching ever recorded in New Jersey an all-but-forgotten chapter of local history, and a tragic episode in the annals of Monmouth County's black population.

"That was a very tough period everywhere," said professor Clement Price, chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Rutgers University in Newark, about the era of the Mingo Jack case. Lynchings were epidemic in the South, but rare elsewhere. "It's often referred to as the nadir of race relations in the United States." The inquest At 10 in the morning on the Monday after the lynching, 75 mourners crowded around and inside the home of the late Mingo Jack, whose battered remains rested in a coffin paid for by the county and upgraded, after his stepson's protests, Please see Lynching, page C5 -r-l! XkA II 'id. Vv ft I Wampum t.ak i 11 Li It started for Mauro "Buzz" Baldanza with a brief old newspaper clipping, passed on by a friend of a friend, that hinted at a story whose dark and violent racial tones seemed incompatible with his knowledge of local history. "It just stuck with me," said Baldanza, a 46-year-old Long Branch native and a sergeant with the Oceanport Police Department.

"That there was a lynching, and it was in Eatontown." He wasn't a historian, but he was trained as a detective, and he began spending his off-hours in libraries and archives paging through old court records, squinting at the tiny type of old newspapers, investigating a case that had largely been lost to legend and selective memory. "It held the front page for quite a long period of time," Baldanza said of the 1886 lynching of a 66-year-old black man named Samuel Johnson, widely known as Mingo Jack. "There was no objectivity to the reporting then. They were either for what happened or against what happened." Baldanza was dismayed at the lapses in police work surprised the constable didn't take him to the county jail and at least put him in a secure impressed by the courage of the prosecutors and some of the newspapers especially the Monmouth Democrat, which denounced the lynching and he became convinced of Mingo Jack's innocence. "I don't think they had the right guy," he said.

In Baldanza's view, the most likely culprit was Richard Kearney, a Long Branch man who confessed to the rape that Johnson was accused of, and then recanted. Kearney later was hanged for the murder of another woman. Baldanza's research caught the attention of the county archivist, Gary Saretzky, who helped guide him through old records, and who then compiled Baldanza's work including his 22-page single-spaced account of the case in a special file in the archives. Saretzky hopes to use the material as part of a planned exhibit on infamous county murders. "The attitude of the public toward racism has changed," Baldanza said, in recounting the lessons he has drawn from the case.

"As a whole it's improved, certainly as far as a bunch of people breaking into a jail cell, dragging a guy out and hanging him." OS ti-J 4 PL- ,0. tf lynching i' Monmoutrt rr- S4 County TON! MISTHOS'StafT Artist 1 K0 LY! 5BE FOUND pWS? sixTOM The lynching of Mingo Jack was among the headlines in the Monday, March 8, 1886, issue of The New York Times. That morning, Mingo Jack's funeral was held, while an inquest to determine who murdered him opened in Eatontown. a ftfa. turn u.

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