Vice President Harris, who is open to convening a federal commission to examine reparations for Black Americans, will face pressure from advocates to take concrete steps to advance the cause nationally if she wins the White House.

Ms. Harris has signaled explicit support in recent years for providing reparations for Black Americans to compensate for slavery and discrimination. She signed on to a Senate bill in 2019 that would have created a federal commission to study the matter, and she called for “some form of reparations” when she ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

She also made a public promise in 2019 to support reparations legislation if elected president, telling Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, “When I am elected president, I will sign that bill.”

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Asked in a 2019 CNN interview if she supported “financial reparations,” Ms. Harris responded, “I support that we should study it. We should study it and see. … This is very real, and it needs to be studied.”

Now that she’s leading the 2024 Democratic ticket, Ms. Harris has largely remained silent on reparations.

On Sept. 24, Ms. Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia she is “not discounting the importance of any executive action” to create a commission to study reparations for Black Americans. However, she said that Congress would be “the impetus of this conversation.”

Unless Congress advances legislation to create a federal reparations commission, which is unlikely, there will be mounting pressure on Ms. Harris, who would be the first Black woman president, to establish one through executive action, said Kamilah Moore, who chaired California’s Reparations Task Force.

“Some reparations organizations are currently trying to put appropriate pressure on the Biden administration to do something via executive action now because they figure he’s a lame duck and doesn’t have anything else to lose,” Ms. Moore said. “But then they’re also kind of prepping and priming to put that same pressure onto Kamala Harris.”

Advocates have watched with growing frustration as legislation creating a reparations commission stalled in Congress, and a series of reparations bills were blocked in California.

Human Rights Watch, the National African-Reparations Commission and other organizations are demanding executive action on the issue.

“If Biden is serious about making progress on racial justice during his administration, there is no time to waste,” Human Rights Watch organizers said.

In 2021, when Democrats most recently controlled the House, a top committee advanced legislation to create a commission to “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” The bill died after Democratic leaders failed to bring it to the House floor for a vote.

Republicans took the majority in 2023, dimming any chance of passage, and reparations advocates have been unable to convince President Biden to act unilaterally.

The support for reparations is divided sharply along racial lines.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in 2023 found only 15% of White Americans support paying reparations for descendants of enslaved Black Americans, compared to 75% of Black Americans who said they supported it. Among Hispanics, 36% said they backed reparations.

As the two presidential candidates battle for moderate voters in swing states, Ms. Harris’s opponent, former President Donald Trump, seized on her reparations comments to turn off voters by framing her as a liberal who will implement a radical agenda.

Mr. Trump’s campaign recently circulated a mock agenda they said Ms. Harris would implement if elected that included “taxpayer-funded reparations.”

University of San Diego Law Professor Roy L. Brooks, an expert on reparations, said because the issue divides the nation, advocates will have to wait for action if Ms. Harris is elected. She’s unlikely to take up reparations during her campaign or early in her presidency if she wins, Mr. Brooks said.

“I don’t think she’s going to touch it with a 10-foot pole, at least for the first 100 days, or maybe even the first two years of her administration, because it’s really sort of unpopular,” Mr. Brooks said. “She’s going to handle other matters and not really tackle reparations until she has secured her administration. Once that’s done, she may attack it. And then the question is, how do you do it?”

Mr. Brooks pointed to California, where several reparations bills recently stalled and one measure that passed the legislature, which would have returned property taken under racially motivated eminent domain, was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat.

Mr. Newsom instead signed a bill to issue a formal apology from California for racial segregation and slavery.

Reparations activists in Sacramento, angry that the legislature did not pass legislation providing reparations for slavery, said refusal to address the issue would hurt Ms. Harris’s chances in November.

“The governor needs to understand the world is watching California, and this is going to have a direct impact on your friend Kamala Harris, who is running for president,” one activist said. “This is going to have a direct impact, so pull up the bills now, vote on them and sign them. We’ve been waiting for over 400 years.”

Mr. Brooks said at the federal level, cash reparations “are off the table,” and the only viable path is for reparations “that go to the community, not just specific individuals.”

Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he expects Ms. Harris, if elected, to pivot away from individual reparations to focus on racial healing by creating a task force or a commission for “truthful conversations about the racial past and hopefully the racial future.”

Ms. Harris, during a 2019 NPR interview, said reparations for Black Americans could come in the form of mental health programs for “untreated and undiagnosed trauma” related to centuries of slavery. “You need to put resources and direct resources — extra resources — into those communities that have experienced that trauma,” she said.

Reparations, Ms. Harris said, have more than one definition.

“But what I mean by it is that we need to study the effects of generations of discrimination and institutional racism and determine what can be done, in terms of intervention, to correct course,” she said.