"We were able to step in and say, 'Hey, let's slow down and see if we can get the information out,' " Brown said. "We're talking about two or three incidents like this in a very long process."
Before Unity 1999 in Seattle, Washington state was trying to end its affirmative-action programs, and black journalists wanted to protest by holding the convention elsewhere. Other groups had already given in to black journalists who wanted to stage the first Unity in Atlanta. "Georgia is where the Trail of Tears started" but Native American journalists attended that convention anyway, said Paul DeMain, managing editor of News from Indian Country in Hayward, Wis., and former Unity president.
Phonethip Liu of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville confers with students Walter Gabriel, left, and Gregory Lee, deputy high school editor for The Washington Post, about a graphic they are working on for the Unity News.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Still, the other organizations made a stand, and the NABJ -- the oldest, largest and most profitable of the organizations -- backed down.
By pressing on despite disagreements, Unity has become admired by civil rights organizations such as the National Urban League and political groups such as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- which prefer joint board meetings to conventions, to avoid the logistical and cultural headaches.
Still, people disagree about what Unity has become.
Dinah Eng, a freelance Gannett News Service columnist and former president of Unity and the Asian American Journalists Association, said the goal of Unity was worth whatever it took to bring people together.
"I think that all true change starts with vision and leadership," she said, "and the people who put together this effort really saw the challenges and benefits to doing this, and they overcame their fears to make it happen."
But George E. Curry, editor in chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service and a member of the NABJ, said convention-goers do not truly unify.
"I don't like Unity," Curry said. "To really have unity, you should have panelists from each group represented on every panel, with blacks hearing about Asians, Native Americans hearing about Hispanics. It's not like that."
That may have been true in the past, Lopez and others said. But this year, Unity organizers required event planners to seat a representative of each racial group on all Unity panels. That way, the thinking went, people would mix during the day as they did at nightly parties and fiestas in Seattle.
Wickham said Unity has evolved into a single entity, contrary to the original intent.
"The initial idea was four boards, four presidents, with planning by executive directors," he said. "It was a function of our cooperative relationship. Today it's morphed into something that has no useful purpose. I see nothing that clearly indicates to me what purpose this organization serves other than to call a meeting."
But what a meeting it is, some convention-goers said: a sea of brown, black, Asian and Indian faces from throughout the world. African drums, traditional Native American dances, Chinese parades and Latin-world festivities have opened and closed the gathering.
"It's a relief," said Mei-Ling Hopgood, a Chinese American reporter for the Dayton Daily News and Cox Newspapers, who works among the Washington press corps. "I've never worked at a place that had a majority of . . . people like me. It's refreshing. You feel more like you belong."
Gonzalez, now a columnist for the New York Daily News and president of the NAHJ, and Sutton, deputy managing editor of the News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., said they never dreamed there would be even one convention like Unity.
"People are beginning to perceive how big this thing is," Gonzalez said. For the NAHJ, "it's going to be the most successful convention we've had, and the same is true for NABJ."
