The 1929 Wall Street trading day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell nearly 12 percent was called Black Tuesday.
Black Tuesday occurred on 29 October 1929, after major selling had already struck the New York Stock Exchange on Black Thursday, 24 October, and Black Monday, 28 October. About 16 million shares changed hands, a record at the time, as investors rushed to sell. The Dow dropped 30.57 points, or 11.7 percent, that day.
Black Tuesday is commonly treated as the symbolic climax of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, although prices continued falling afterward. The crash exposed the fragility of heavily leveraged speculation and was followed by a prolonged economic contraction known as the Great Depression. The crash itself did not cause every feature of the Depression; banking failures, monetary policy, debt, and international economic problems also played important roles.