The white man who allegedly attacked a black man with a baseball bat in Howard Beach early Wednesday morning was charged with a hate crime yesterday, but some African-American leaders said it would take more than prosecutions in the case to ease the tension and prejudice in the community.

At his arraignment yesterday, Nicholas Minucci, 21, was charged with assault as a hate crime, robbery, and possession of a criminal weapon. A Queens Criminal Court judge, Lenora Gerald, ordered that he be held without bail until his next court date, on July 20. If convicted, Minucci faces a minimum of 8 years in prison.

Police alleged that Minucci attacked Glenn Moore, 22, with an aluminum baseball bat, leaving him with a fractured skull.

A friend of Minucci’s, Anthony Ench, 22, was arrested yesterday in connection with the case and was to be charged today with assault and robbery as hate crimes.

Another man who was allegedly present at the time of the encounter, Frank Agostini, 20 – who, according to the Associated Press, is the son of a police detective – surrendered to police and was being described late yesterday as a witness to the crime.

According to the director of trauma surgery at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, Geoffrey Doughlin, Mr. Moore was in critical but stable condition yesterday, suffering from internal bleeding in the brain, a bruised kidney, and impaired hearing.

Minucci allegedly acknowledged that he used racial slurs while attacking Mr. Moore and chasing the man’s two friends, and he alleged in a statement to prosecutors that Ench told Mr. Moore, “This is what you get when you try to rob white boys.”

Friends of Mr. Moore, an Army veteran who the Associated Press said pleaded guilty in 2003 to a misdemeanor after he was arrested in an auto-theft case, allegedly told police Wednesday that they were planning to steal a car earlier in the evening. Nevertheless, the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Bloomberg described the attack on the three black men as racially motivated.

“There’s no evidence, whatsoever, number one, that the perpetrator had any idea of why the victim was in the neighborhood, or allegedly in the neighborhood,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday morning. “But number two, even if they did, we do not allow vigilantism in this city, but let me stress there’s no evidence that in this case it was anything other than a racially motivated attack on somebody whose motivations for being in the neighborhood the perpetrator, as far as we can tell, did not know.

Minucci, however, said in his written statement to Queens prosecutors that the assault was provoked. He allegedly said he sought out the black men because they had pushed him up against a wall earlier in the night and tried to rob him, using a screwdriver as a weapon. No charges were brought against Mr. Moore or his friends in connection with those allegations.

According to published reports, both Minucci and Mr. Ench have prior convictions. Minucci is on probation in the 2002 stabbing of a youth. Mr. Ench was convicted earlier this year of disorderly conduct.

As city officials and community members reflected on the details of the incident, they were haunted by memories of an infamous 1986 conflict similarly loaded with racial tension. Three black men walked into a pizza parlor in Howard Beach after their car broke down, and a group of white teenagers chased them through the streets with baseball bats.

After one of the fleeing men, Michael Griffith, ran onto the Belt Parkway to escape, he was struck and killed by a car.

At that time, the Reverend Alford Sharpton led a series of protests against racial discrimination and violence. Yesterday, Rev. Sharpton stood in front of the Jamaica hospital with Mr. Moore’s mother, Chaundra Eison, and said he had thought the horrors of 1986 were long gone.

“I hope this mother and this family receive the support of the city, including the whites and blacks of Howard Beach,” Rev. Sharpton said. “At a time when the city can show we’ve grown, we need to show not only that we know how to host a world, but how to behave to one another.”

Another prominent black minister, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry of the House of Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, told The New York Sun yesterday that he vividly remembered the aftermath of the 1986 incident.

“Last time they threw watermelons at us and called us names,” Rev. Daughtry said. “Some people say we’ve made progress. That remains to be seen.”

Rev. Daughtry called for a re-examination of the values that communities instill in their youngsters.

“Is this something they learned growing up in that neighborhood?” he asked. “It may be we have missed the lesson that we need to learn, that our children reflect the values of an adult society.”

For both ministers, the incident harked back to Griffith’s death, which Mayor Koch likened at the time to a lynching.

Mr. Moore’s lawyer, Derek Sells, who spoke after Rev. Sharpton in front of the hospital, also invoked the language of an earlier era of race relations in America.

Gesturing to Ms. Eison, Mr. Sells said: “I find it very hard to follow the fact that there was a lynch mob who came out to kill her son.”

Before addressing the press, Rev. Sharpton, Rev. Daughtry, and Mr. Sells had visited Mr. Moore in the hospital with the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, and a City Council member from Brooklyn, Charles Barron.

Mr. Barron said that the group had stood around Mr. Moore’s hospital bed holding hands as Rev. Sharpton said a prayer. He described Mr. Moore’s condition, saying the man was in pain but whispered faintly as he thanked everyone for coming.

In a press conference in front of City Hall, the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, said Minucci and his companions “should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Ms. Fields, however, said she chooses not to emphasize punishment, but instead focusing on prevention.

“I am, effective immediately, establishing an Anti-Hate-Crime Initiative that will bring together religious leaders and community leaders,” Ms. Fields said in a statement. “It’s not enough to condemn the attacks after they occur; elected officials in New York have an obligation to make a clear commitment to rooting out the underlying causes that lead to these attacks.”

The council member who represents Howard Beach, Joseph Addabbo Jr., said he worried that New Yorkers would unfairly label the neighborhood.

“We are trying to get out of the shadows of 1986, 1987,” he said. “The people of my district are truly, truly saddened by what happened over the last couple of days. They are fearful that this label of racism will be put on this whole community.”