The first major day of the 1929 Wall Street Crash was Black Thursday.
Black Thursday occurred on October 24, 1929, at the New York Stock Exchange. About 12.9 million shares changed hands, then an exceptionally high volume, as investors rushed to sell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply during the session, although a group of prominent bankers later bought heavily traded shares and helped the market recover much of its intraday decline.
The selling resumed during the following week. October 28 became known as Black Monday, and October 29 became Black Tuesday. Those later sessions produced even more severe losses and are often remembered as the decisive collapse. Black Thursday therefore identifies the opening shock of the famous crash, not its worst single day. The crash contributed to a prolonged bear market and formed part of the wider economic background to the Great Depression, although historians do not treat the market collapse alone as its sole cause.