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.