When Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination in 2020, he said the nation was issuing "the most compelling call for racial justice since the '60s."
Months later after winning the presidency, he said, "the African American community stood up again for me. You've always had my back, and I'll have yours."
On the campaign trail, Biden made several promises to address racial injustice. Biden kept his promise to reduce the rate of uninsured African Americans and has taken steps toward his promise to make historically Black colleges and universities more affordable.
But, on another promise, we found scant evidence of action: Biden promised to support the study of reparations. He did not promise to pay reparations — only to support its study.
Biden could form a commission to study reparations or back a long-standing proposal in Congress to study it. He could give a speech calling for a study on reparations. We found no evidence that he took any such steps.
In June, a reporter asked Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre about reparations.
"The president has been really clear when it — as it relates to reparation, he wants to see a study of reparations. ... and studying the continuing impacts of slavery. He believes that is incredibly important," Jean-Pierre replied.
When the reporter asked what Biden would do after such a study, Jean-Pierre said,: "We've got to let the study move forward."
Since 1989, Democrats have introduced bills that call for studying reparations for African Americans. The idea for reparations gained more attention in 2020 after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, reintroduced related legislation in January 2023, but it has not received a vote in the Republican-led House. The bill, H.R. 40, is named for the phrase "40 acres and a mule," which represents the unfulfilled promise of reparations made to enslaved people after emancipation in the 1860s.
Advocates say reparations would be a way to make amends for injustices and disparities endured by descendants of the millions of people who were enslaved in the centuries before emancipation.
Niambi Carter, a Howard University associate professor of political science, told us at the end of Biden's first year in office that his promise was easy for the president to ignore because it is a "deeply unpopular issue."
Although Biden knows Black voters are a core constituency, Carter said, the president also knows white Americans' support for reparations is comparatively anemic. Multiple polls in recent years have shown a majority of all Americans oppose reparations.
William A Darity Jr., a Duke University public policy professor, said Biden's reluctance "might be attributable to a calculation that, on net, it would hurt his campaign prospects."
Some experts who have studied reparations say that Biden's promise to only "study" reparations doesn't go far enough.
"While further study is always desirable, it is not necessary to move ahead with an actual down payment," said Thomas Craemer, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut.
He said Biden could urge Congress to pass an actual down payment rather than instituting a study group.
"This down payment should be sufficiently large to close the average per-capita Black-White wealth gap resulting from federally legislated slavery and post-slavery race discrimination," Craemer said in an email.
Biden has several months left in office to support a study, but so far he has done nothing. If he takes action before his term ends, we will revisit this promise. For now, though, we rate this Promise Broken.
RELATED: PolitiFact's Biden Promise Tracker