Black Thursday is the nickname for the first major selling day of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, 24 October 1929.
Trading opened amid heavy selling on the New York Stock Exchange, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply. A group of prominent bankers later tried to restore confidence by buying leading shares, temporarily stabilizing prices. That intervention did not end the crisis.
The panic returned with even greater force on Black Monday, 28 October, and Black Tuesday, 29 October. Those sessions helped turn a severe market decline into a symbol of the wider economic collapse that followed.
Black Thursday is sometimes confused with Black Tuesday because both names belong to the same 1929 episode. The sequence matters: Thursday was the first major panic day, while Tuesday produced the enormous trading volume and became the crash's best-known date.