Asbury Park Press from Asbury Park, New Jersey • Page 45

SUNDAY, FEB. 22, 1998 ASBURY PARK PRESS PAGE C5 COVER STORY Why are you Lynching inquest was major news event never broke. After two hours of deliberation, a verdict was reached; Johnson had been "willfully murdered by some person or persons to the jury unknown." A minority verdict further recommended that the editor of the Eatontown Advertiser receive "a severe rebuke and censure for his open and public encouragement of mob law and violence." The prosecutor wasn't quite ready to surrender yet, though, and five men were later arrested, including the constable who had so carelessly dan- gled a prisoner justly dispatched. Johnson had tangled with the law before, and was, according to the Times, "looked upon with suspicion by reasonable people." But doubts arose with the testimony of the 24-year-old victim herself. A little past 4 on Friday afternoon, Angelina Herbert had set out from the house where she lived with her father and brothers, two miles south of the village on Poplar Road (now Route 35, in the vicinity of the Sheraton), to return a tin baking pan to a neighbor.

As she walked alone through the From page CI from the plain pine box the undertaker first presented. Johnson's invalid widow lay in the sleeping loft. "We must all die," said the preacher who presided over the funeral, reading from the gospel according to Matthew. "After death comes the judgment" Before he met the prematurely final judgment of his life, Mingo Jack had been working as a groom a "rubber" of horses at nearby Monmouth Park. Born a slave on Samuel Laird's farm in Colts Neck, he was a small seemed slim.

"The people of Eatontown sanction the removal of Johnson," wrote Jacob Coffin, the defiant editor of the Eatontown Advertiser, in an editorial that urged the county prosecutors to drop the inquest, "they are satisfied that he deserved his fate, they are glad that men of nerve were found to represent them, and they do not want them convicted and punished for a crime which, in the light of the circumstances which led to it, is not a crime but just retribution." The prosecutors focused on a group of men who had spent Friday evening in Al- len's Hotel, ia nav uAneV BacK 28.8 Modem mum -r ft Comcast Cable Modem it Live: INTERNET CAFE 1 W. front Bd Bank man, maybe 120 pounds, but fit "an athletic negro, coal black, with kinky hair that was longer than colored men usually wear," according to the reporter from the New York Sun, one of the many journalists who flocked to Eatontown to cover the case. Johnson was buried in a pauper's grave in what is now the White Ridge Cemetery off Wall Street. I The people of Eatontown sanction the removal of Johnson, they are satisfied that he deserved his fate, they are glad that men of nerve were found to represent them, and they do not want them convicted and punished for a crime which, in the light of the circumstances which led to it, is not a crime but just retribution. Jacob Coffin EDITOR, THE EATONTOWN ADVERTISER IN AN EDITORIAL URGING PROSECUTORS TO DROP THE INQUEST af It is painfully evident to everyone who reads the proceedings that many of the witnesses are concealing the facts for the purpose of shielding from punishment the actors in this great crime against organized society.

(The lynching was a) cowardly assassination, succeeded by terrorism over the little community in which was committed, and wholesale perjury by the actors in it in order to escape the penalties of outraged law.f The Monmouth Democrat FREEHOLD NEWSPAPER'S COMMENTS ON THE LYNCHING AND SUBSEQUENT INQUEST drinking, blustering, and tying a knot in a length of rope, but every wit-n who stepped up to the piano stool developed a sudden and complete case of amnesia. There had been much loose talk both before the lynching nigger ought to be and after have sent him as far toward hell as we can get him on but as evidence it before a mob. Warrants were issued for two others, who fled to New York. But the grand jury failed to indict anyone, and Johnson's killers along with, perhaps, Angelina Herbert's true attacker went unpunished. Two years later, a Long Branch man, facing the gallows in Freehold for the murder of another woman, confessed after he was accused of the Herbert rape by some other inmates.

thick pine forest, she was suddenly clubbed from behind by an assailant wielding a 3-foot length of red oak, dragged off the path into the bushes and raped. "Do you know Mingo Jack?" her attacker had asked before fleeing, a question that she and the constable, and everyone else who heard it in the retelling took as an identification, not a diversion. She had only seen Johnson at a distance before, and she de vvi)f ifHwrtfi Kin a i- iji)r' tn iiiin iihi 'Ittfjiltl OOlr JHil; itiHitu "(Hi'MHSSi- lift jstjfU' t-bti ti5 Hi tn i tut Ml, ilati UM'iiW i 1 'lflnnpNitiii M. Although he recanted before he was hanged, his account seemed plausible to many at the time. A few years later, yet another suspect surfaced, a sailor long dead of typhoid, whose deathbed confession was recounted by a Philadelphia reporter.

So notorious had the case been that an 1889 map of Monmouth County noted the location of the jail with the words "Mingo Jack Lynched Here." The fateful build Tuimifi 1. I 111 1 a iIIOIIJIIHM At the same hour, an inquest was opening at Hall's Hotel, "a big rambling building that stands at the junction of the two main streets in town (what is now Route 35 and Broad Street)," according to The New York Times. The jurors sat on green couches, the witnesses on a piano stool. The room was packed with local men in cowhide boots and flannel shirts. Black people stood in the rear.

The overflow crowd gathered on the broad porch, watching through the windows. Liquor was served, witnesses not excepted. "The jury was polled and then smiled at itself," the Times wrote. "The crowd smiled, too." The mood in town, the Times reported, was "triumph, pride and dismay, in about equal portions," the inquest was viewed as "an exquisite farce," and the chances of ever identifying any lynchers was strictly hearsay. "It is painfully evident to everyone who reads the proceedings that many of the witnesses are concealing the facts for the purpose of shielding from punishment the actors in this great crime against organized society," wrote the Monmouth Democrat, the strongest local voice against the lynching, which it described as a "cowardly assassination, succeeded by terrorism over the little community in which it was committed, and wholesale perjury by the actors in it in order to escape the penalties of outraged law." One after another, the witnesses denied hearing, seeing, knowing, even thinking anything vaguely incriminating of anyone, stubborn and united in their disdain for the inquest, certain in their belief that a dangerous criminal had been scribed her attacker as wearing a derby hat and overalls.

But several subsequent witnesses, white and black alike, testified that Johnson had never even owned a pair of overalls, and that he was wearing on his head that day the same thing he always wore an old jockey cap with the patched earflaps pinned up. The inquest pressed on through 90 witnesses in six days, through ridicule, uncooperation, even death threats they course in the Mingo Jack mater, or afore longs days, when the golden sun rises in the eastern sky; it will rise, to shine upon the lifeless body of John W. Swartz," one letter warned the prosecutor), but the wall of silence r-ra iwi Hurra ing, just 12 feet square, stood for many more decades, but the site is empty now, and tells as little about the story as the forgotten, un js a marked grave of the man who died there. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Read Across New Jersey Day Governor says, "It's okay!" "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you 'Ugo.

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