1926
- Countee Cullen becomes Assistant Editor of Opportunity; begins to write a regular column "The Dark Tower."
- March: Savoy Ballroom opened in Harlem.
- Publications of Wallace Thurman, Fire!!; Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues; Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven; Eric Walrond, Tropic Death; W. C. Handy, Blues: An Anthology; and Walter White, Flight.
1927
- In Abraham's Bosom by Paul Green, with an all-black cast, won the Pulitzer Prize, May.
- Ethel Waters first appeared on Broadway, July.
- Marcus Garvey deported.
- Louis Armstrong in Chicago and Duke Ellingtonin New York began their careers.
- Harlem Globetrotters established.
- Charlotte Mason decides to become a patron of the New Negro.
- A'Lelia Walker opens a tearoom salon called "The Dark Tower."
- Publications of Miguel Covarrubias, Negro Drawings; Cullen, Ballad of the Brown Girl, Copper Sun, and Caroling Dusk; Arthur Fauset, For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro; Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew; James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (reprint of the 1912 edition); Alain Locke and Montgomery T. Gregory, eds. Plays of Negro Life.
1928
- Countee Cullen marries Nina Yolande, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, April 9; described as the social event of the decade.
- Publications of Wallace Thurman, Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; Du Bois, The Dark Princess; Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem.
1929
- February: Negro Experimental Theatre founded
- June: Negro art Theatre founded
- September: National Colored Players founded.
- Wallace Thurman's play Harlem, written with William Jourdan Rapp, opens at the Apollo Theater on Broadway and becomes hugely successful.
- October 29, Black Thursday, Stock Exchange crash.
- Publications of Cullen, The Black Christ and Other Poems;Claude McKay, Banjo; Nella Larsen, Passing; Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry; and Walter White, Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch.
1930
- The Green Pastures (musical), with an all-black cast, opened on Broadway, February 26.
- Universal Holy Temple of Tranquillity founded; Black Muslims opened Islam Temple in Detroit.
- Publications of Randolph Edmonds, Shades and Shadows; Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations; James Weldon Johnson. Black Manhattan; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter.
1931
- April- July: The Scottsboro trial
- August 16: A'Lelia Walker dies
- Publications of Arna Bontemps, God Sends Sunday; Jessie Fauset, The Chinaberry Tree; Langston Hughes, Dear Lovely Death, The Negro Mother, Not Without Laughter, Scottsboro Limited; Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900; George S. Schuyler, Black No More; and Toomer, Essentials.
1932
- June: Twenty young black intellectuals travel to Russia to make a movie, Black and White
- Mass defection of blacks from the Republican Party began.
- Publications of Sterling Brown, Southern Road; Cullen, One Way to Heaven; Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure Man Dies; Hughes, The Dream Keeper; Claude McKay, Ginger Town; Schuyler, Slaves Today; Thurman, Infants of the Spring.
1933
- National Negro Business League ceased operations after 33 years.
- Publications of Jessie Fauset, Comedy, American Style; James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way; McKay, Banana Bottom.
1934
- December 22 and 26: Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman die within four days of each other
- W.E.B. Du Bois resigns from The Crisis and NAACP.
- Apollo Theatre opened.
- Publications of Arna Bontemps, You Can't Pet a Possum; Randolph Edmonds, Six Plays for the Negro Theatre; Hughes, The Ways of White Folks; Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine; James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans: What Now?; George Lee, Beale Street: Where the Blues Began.
1935
- March 19: Harlem Race Riot.
- October 10: Porgy and Bess, with an all-black cast, opens on Broadway
- Octerober 25: Mulatto by Langston Hughes, first full-length play by a black writer, opens on Broadway.
- 50 percent of Harlem's families unemployed.
- Publications of Cullen, The Medea and Other Poems; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; Willis Richardson and May Sullivan, Negro History in Thirteen Plays.
1937
Publications of McKay, Long Way From Home; Hurston, Their Eyes Were
Watching God.
1939
Publication of Hurston, Moses: Man of the Mountain.
1940
Publications of Hughes The Big Sea; McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis.