In 2019, in her first campaign for president, then-Sen. Kamala Harris called for “some form of reparations” for Black Americans and threw her support behind legislation to study the issue of repayment for historic wrongs.
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Reparations advocates say Harris’s past comments and her new position as the first Black and Asian American woman to head a presidential ticket give them renewed hope that the movement to provide recompense for Black Americans for decades of discrimination could gain new, national traction.
“We have a Black woman with a lived experience and a heart for the Black community,” said Robin Rue Simmons, a former alderman in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., who pushed a program that provides qualifying Black residents with $25,000 to address the city’s history of housing discrimination. “I believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is the leader to advance this conversation at the federal level.”
But how Harris feels now, five years after expressing support in her first presidential campaign, how high the issue rests in her priorities and what impact that may have on the coalition of voters she must assemble to defeat Republican Donald Trump remains a mystery.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris’s campaign, speaking for her, has rejected her 2019 opposition to fracking, the practice of extracting natural gas that is popular in vote-heavy Pennsylvania, her past support of a single payer health care program and her more liberal proposals on immigration.
The Harris campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her current position on reparations.
Some Harris allies argue that support for reparations could help her attract Black voters who have been swayed somewhat by Trump’s economic message.
“There are people who support this and would be more politically engaged if this were a part of our political discourse,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said in an interview before Harris accepted the nomination. “But it isn’t, so they’re staying home or some are even moving to the Republican Party because it feels like Democrats are taking Black voters for granted.”
Yet even some advocates worry that a forceful call for reparations could alienate more voters than it energizes.
While Democratic cities and states have pushed for reparations, the programs still face stiff political headwinds nationally. Just about a quarter of Americans support the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, according to a 2023 Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
The poll found large racial gaps in support for reparations. While 75 percent of Black Americans support federal reparations, only 15 percent of White Americans and 36 percent of Hispanic Americans agree. That has made some leery of Harris making the issue part of her argument for the presidency.
Harris’s November opponent has hewed closer to public opinion in his limited remarks on reparations. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Trump said that he didn’t see a path forward for reparations advocates.
“I think it’s a very unusual thing,” Trump said in 2019 of the possibility of reparations. “You have a lot of — it’s been a very interesting debate. I don’t see it happening, no.”
Quentin James, president of the Collective PAC, a Democratic political action committee that backs Black candidates, suggested that reparations would be a distraction for the Harris campaign before such a high-stakes election.
“I think reparations will be a major policy conversation over the next few years, but I don’t think we need to start that conversation before the election,” he said.
“There’s strong evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris will be one of the most vocal supporters of us having that dialogue as a nation,” he said.
Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University, said it would make more sense for Harris to focus on the issues where Democrats agree.
“Not all Democrats have come out in favor of reparations, and you can find lots of different quotes from people saying they’re against them,” Azari said. “Why stoke an intraparty fight when you could just keep highlighting things your opponents have done that are unpopular, like book bans and changing the way people teach history?”
Even during her first campaign, Harris carefully parsed her support for reparations, so much so that the headline of a 2019 interview with the Root, a publication aimed at Black Americans, declared that she “wants reparations (sort of).”
“I think there has to be some form of reparations, and we can discuss what that is,” she said in the interview with the Root. “We’re looking at more than 200 years of slavery. We’re looking at almost 100 years of Jim Crow. We’re looking at legalized segregation and in fact, segregation on so many levels that exist today based on race. And there has not been any kind of intervention.”
She did not endorse specific proposals but instead made broad statements of support. For example, when asked in 2019 on CNN if she supported reparations in the form of cash payments, she said: “I support that we study that.”
The systemic issues facing the Black community “are present and will continue to exist, whether or not you write a check,” Harris told the Des Moines Register in 2019 in another interview.
Some advocates say Harris should clarify whether reparations programs would solely be for Black people. In a 2019 interview with TheGrio, she said, “I’m not going to sit here and say I’m going to do something that’s only going to benefit Black people.” But she did not say what other groups she would like to see eligible.
Trevor Smith, executive director of the BLIS Collective, an organization that seeks recompense for Black and Native Americans, said he has seen a lot of discussion about that comment in the Black community in recent weeks, underscoring what he said was concern that Harris isn’t really committed to reparations. He said she should clarify her views on reparations for voters before the election.
“People can change their views, people can change their mind,” Smith said. “I think it’s important to hold her accountable for whether or not she still feels that way.”
Smith and other activists said they were skeptical in part because of previous unfulfilled promises by Democrats. The Democratic National Committee’s 2020 and 2024 platform endorsed a federal commission to study the issue of reparations but reparations advocates have spent years unsuccessfully pushing the Biden administration to issue an executive order that would set up a federal commission to do so.
The Biden administration has said that any commission should be created by Congress.
Smith said that compared with other candidates, he had more hope that Harris would follow through on her past campaign promises, but he’d like to hear her address the issue as a 2024 candidate.
“We can’t keep kicking it down the road,” he said.
“In 2020, we were all talking about racial justice and anti-Blackness because we all watched a Black man get murdered on video,” Smith said. “It shouldn’t take that level of an atrocity for us to be able to have these conversations.”
The political crosscurrents of reparations have been evident in California, which in some ways is leading the conversation on reparations — within limits.
This summer, California lawmakers set aside $12 million in the state budget to fund reparations efforts.. It is just a fraction of what activists called for but was hailed by many as a historic investment for the movement in a year when the state faced a nearly $47 billion budget shortfall. The state reparations task force had recommended individual payments of as much as $1.2 million to older Black residents to address past discrimination in housing, health care, policing, property seizures and commerce.
Yet even as the Democratic-controlled legislature passed a number of reparations bills over the weekend, they declined to take up two measures that would have established and financed an agency to administer reparation payments to individuals.
Amos Brown, a member of California’s reparations committee who also has served as Harris’s personal pastor, said California offers an example of how Harris could embrace forms of reparations that will help Black America without turning off other voting blocs. In addition to cash payments, the task force made dozens of policy recommendations, including eliminating barriers for formerly incarcerated people to obtain business licenses, funding community efforts to decrease violence and expanding health-care coverage.
“In the state of California, we’re working to get land that has been taken away from Black people returned, getting educational programs and addressing mass incarnation,” Brown said. “We have got to be pragmatic. We have got to be deliberative.”
