AVENTURA, Florida – If Sen. Bernie Sanders has struggled to get love from black voters during his presidential runs, it was hard to tell during the Vermont senator's appearance before a convention of black journalists here in Southern Florida.

A loose, relatively avuncular Sanders stood out in a mini-forum of four 2020 presidential candidates at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, on Thursday, even though he made only slight adjustments of his free-college, Medicaid-for-all, tax-Wall Street-to-pay-for-it stump speech.

Despite a notoriously tough crowd, and a panel of influential reporters asking about his position on black America, Sanders was warmly received during his introduction, was cheered at his exit and had the audience engaged in a brief call-and-response session when describing his student debt forgiveness plan.

"OK, we're doing all right here," he quipped.

Meanwhile, two of his more than 20 Democratic primary rivals – Pete Buttegieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker – didn't seem to leave as much of an impression on the audience, despite focusing more on race than Sanders.

Buttigieg told the crowd he hopes to dismantle white supremacy and revive black communities to make the nation stronger, while Booker highlighted his bona fides helping revive a struggling Newark, N.J. community and vowed to unite a nation divided along racial lines.

And by the time Bill Weld, President Donald Trump's only Republican challenger, took the stage to sell his fiscal-conservative platform, about half of the crowd, which had been near capacity when Sanders hit the stage, had vanished.

The four-candidate forum came during the second day of a four-day forum of African American journalists in this suburb north of Miami. The confab generally attracts presidential candidates in campaign years; Hillary Clinton addressed the organization during its convention in Washington in 2016, while then-Senator Barack Obama spoke to the group in Chicago during his 2008 White House run.

This year, in their NABJ appearances, all three Democratic candidates praised the role of African American journalists, all three strongly condemned Trump as a racist demagogue and all three said their plans would help reverse decades of decay in black communities.

Buttigieg was the first candidate to take the stage to polite applause. The youthful mayor has taken a lot of heat recently for racial controversies that have buffeted his campaign. As mayor, he fired the city's first African American police chief who was the subject of an FBI investigation, and in June a white South Bend cop shot and killed a black man during a confrontation.

In prepared remarks, Buttigieg argued he's the best candidate to address the nation's fractured racial landscape because he has learned from both experiences. He described his "Douglass Plan" – a sweeping package of aid for urban communities, named for famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass – and vowed to dismantle the culture of white supremacy that he says has flourished under Trump.

Questioned at the forum by MSNBC anchor Craig Melvin, Buttigieg says he's learned "first hand" about the pain and anger in the black community, strife he says is directly tied to the nation's halting progress toward – and away from – racial equality.

With him in the White House, Buttigieg says, "we can finally be the generation that solves these inequities."

Sanders' appearance, by contrast, was best illustrated by a statement he made outlining the differences: "It's a national issue, it's an African American issue."

Sanders took the stage to a smattering of cheers, and he quickly won over the audience with a variation on his standard stump speech, leavened with well-timed wisecracks and his passion for attacking Wall Street. He says his plans to make college and healthcare free, and pay for it by taxing the rich, would "disproportionately" help black communities.

He stood up after each question from a panel of interviewers, presumably to allow him space for his standard gesticulations, and when one of the interviewers asked if she could stand too, quipped, "We can dance, too, if you want."

The audience seemed to be with Sanders, issuing a few "uh-huhs" and "yeahs" when he described how he would pay for his programs by taxing Wall Street wealth. He even disarmed a heckler who demanded he "answer the question!" about his plan to forgive student debt.

He fired back without missing a beat, describing how his plan would lift the burden that keeps young people struggling under debt, unable to buy a house or start a business and "give(s) them a shot for a decent life."

Unlike Buttigieg, however, Sanders didn't get many tough questions about thorny racial issues, or his own struggles attracting black voters.

Booker combined history and philosophy, reminding black journalists of the legacy of the African American press. He noted that on Wednesday he was speaking at Emanuel AME Church, where a young white supremacist gunned down nine elderly African American worshippers in June 2015.

He's best equipped to lead the nation, Booker said, because he's a bridge-builder who lives between two worlds: his struggling Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood, and the rarified air of the U.S. Senate, where the membership is nearly all white but the maintenance teams that clean the place are mostly black and Latino.

Booker said he's devoted his life to equity and making sure African Americans weren't left behind, including as mayor of Newark. But he also said black and Latino voters need to learn the lessons from recent history: when he went to vote for Obama in Newark in 2008, he said, the lines stretched around the block but in 2016, with Clinton on the ballot, poll workers were "lonely."

"I think we need a revival of civic grace in this country," a philosophy that "gets us to see each other" and "activates … engagement to understand that we have a common destiny," he said. "I'm going to campaign that way because I want to govern that way."