Jul. 5, 2003 - The image is burned into Natalie Carithers' memory: It's the early 1970s, and she and about a dozen other black students are running from Hyde Park High School, hoping to avoid a mob of angry whites. 

"I remember the whole school being surrounded by white folks, with bats and pipes, and we had to run all the way up the street," said Carithers, president of the Boston alumnae chapter of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta. "I'll never forget that." 

The event, which occurred during the school desegregation crisis, shaped the Roxbury native's perception of her hometown as hostile to minorities, an image that she says endures among some of her Delta sisters. It's a perception that some say has made Boston a tough sell to conventions of minority groups, a market estimated to be worth more than $5 billion annually. 

But there are signs that the old perceptions, and Boston's tough time with attracting minority conventions, may be easing. 

The National Association of Black Accountants' annual convention starts Tuesday in Boston, and Carithers' Deltas will hold their Eastern conference in the city two days later. Both gatherings will be at the John B. Hynes Veterans' Memorial Convention Center. The conventions are estimated to bring a total of 5,000 people and $5 million in spending. 

Carithers said she supported efforts to bring the Deltas to Boston, despite some doubts, because members of the sorority had enjoyed a previous meeting in Boston. But she is concerned the Delta members won't find many black businesses to patronize, an important thing to a convention of black professional women. A preconvention clambake is being held at the John F. Kennedy Library because a suitable minority-owned banquet facility couldn't be found, she said. She's also worried about how her sisters might be treated. "It's just not a welcoming city," she said. 

"If you go shopping in stores you're followed. It's better than it used to be, but still you don't see any black folks. Your black businesses aren't out there in the open." 

Interviews with members of the two convention groups show that, among some young blacks, the view of Boston as racially intolerant has all but disappeared. Among older blacks with longer memories, Boston is still a tough sell. 

Still, at least two additional black and Latino groups have signed on to hold meetings in Boston over the next several years, and convention officials are in the final stages of talks with others, said Patrick B. Moscaritolo, president and chief executive of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. 

With a new convention center slated to open next year and the 2004 Democratic National Convention approaching, many local officials say the time is ripe for renewed efforts to woo minority conventioneers to Boston. 

"It's time," said state Senator Dianne Wilkerson, a Roxbury Democrat, who is mounting an effort to bring at least 10 minority conventions to the city by 2005. 

"The Democratic National Committee is coming; the convention center is moving into the final stages of construction; and there not being enough venues to fill it. The city is now officially a `majority-minority' city, so to me, this is a natural order of things to make real the commitment and the promise of what that all means." 

Convincing black accountants and the Deltas that Boston is fulfilling that promise may prove vital for Boston's convention industry. With many other segments of the convention industry in decline over the past three years, the market for ethnic meetings is growing. 

In 2000, conventions of black professional groups were worth $5.6 billion, about 14 percent of the total $96 billion convention market, according to an estimate by Black Meetings and Tourism Magazine, a Los Angeles publication that tracks the market. 

Convention marketers, however, have been having a tough time booking meetings for the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in South Boston -- an $800 million investment -- and organizers of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Boston, are watching the city's progress on race relations. African-Americans are considered among the Democrats' most loyal constituencies, and some of the 3,000 black delegates to the convention have expressed concern about Boston's racial history. 

"I think it's important that they have a successful stay in Boston. It's never good for the City of Boston to be looked at as if it doesn't like black people," said William Dorcena, assistant executive director of Boston 2004, the convention's host committee. 

Local officials are making overtures to black and Latino groups. Wilkerson has held several meetings with representatives of such groups and officials from the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority to discuss combating negative perceptions of Boston. She has also flown to California to meet with officials from the Church of God in Christ, a large and influential black denomination, about holding one of its annual conventions here. That would be a symbolic and economic coup; the group's Auxiliaries in Ministry convention, which wraps up tomorrow, is estimated to have brought 30,000 African-Americans and about $25 million in direct spending to Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association. 

Moscaritolo said Boston is making progress, pointing to meetings the National Association of Black Engineers and the National Minority State Police Officers Association have booked at the Hynes for next year. His group is updating a video, shot nine years ago, that features local black executives touting Boston. "Two words: market conditions," he said. 

"There's been a drop-off in international visitors, and domestic leisure activity is the area that shows the greatest promise in growth. That is why we're looking at that [minority] marketplace." 

Some who are visiting the Hub for the first time, to attend next week's conventions, are ready to accept the city as it is, not as it was. 

"I've heard it's a good city," said Gavin Tuckett, 20, a black student at Chicago State University majoring in accounting. Tuckett, who is with the accountants group, said he wants to look into studying in Boston. The idea of Boston as a city with a troubled racial past is foreign to him, he said: "It has great schools like Harvard. I heard it has a nice downtown area. They said it has beautiful scenery." 

The same view is held by D'Andre May, 20, a junior at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. 

"That has never been an issue; I've never thought about it. I don't know if that's because I'm out of the loop or a generational thing," he said. 

But not everyone is convinced. Many older blacks remember the racial violence of the 1970s and 1980s. 

"People of my generation and older will probably forever associate Boston with busing," said Pamela Thomas, 50, copublisher and editor of Pathfinders Travel Magazine, a Philadelphia publication that covers black travel trends. 

The busing conflict was captured in a famous photo of white student Joseph Rakes striking a black man, Theodore Landsmark, with the pole of an American flag during a rally outside City Hall in 1976. 

"That image of the guy being rammed with the American flag will be enduring," Thomas said. 

Other occurrences were deadly: the sniper shooting of black high school football player Darryl Williams in Charlestown in 1979, the beating and chasing by whites of William Atkinson in Savin Hill in 1982. Atkinson, a black, ran onto tracks in an attempt to escape; a train struck and killed him. 

Monica Lee, 33, of Clarksville, Md., said her parents tried to talk her out of going to Boston in September for a board meeting of the black accountants group. "They didn't think that black folk were welcome in Boston," she said. "They're from the old school, I guess." 

Ty Christian, managing partner at YPBR/Christian, an Orlando marketing firm that specializes in travel and tourism, said that overcoming the problem is going to take a long-term plan and big dollars. He recommends that cities spend about a quarter of their tourism marketing budgets on ethnic marketing, and tells clients that their brochures have to include more than pictures of downtown. 

"For the most part, people of color need an invitation. They always want some sort of advertising to say that it's OK for you to come here. Black travelers have a need to go to our neighborhoods to see what's happening. 

It would be a great idea for the folks in Roxbury to come up with some kind of tourism product. You have to figure out ways to tell that story, and that story's got to be woven into the overall story of Boston." 

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(c) 2003, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.