Black Tuesday, Black Monday, Black Friday

I wanted to point out the actual meanings of some of the "Black" days-of-the-week in the American experience that are frequently misrepresented in popular thinking as being epithets of ill-character.


1. Black Tuesday was the fateful Tuesday in 1929 when the stock-market crashed, which was later seen as the start of the Great Depression in the third decade of the 20th-Century.

2. Black Monday is most commonly known as the crash of the NYSE and AMEX in 1987 that led to the subsequent mass-unemployment and "recession" of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

3. Black Friday, on the other hand (or the non-existent "third hand") is simply the day after Thanksgiving (always celebrated on Thursday in the USA), seen as the start of the annual Christmas gift-buying-rush for various U.S. retailers.

Now there is some room for personal-interpretation here, but I thought this bit of clarification might help a few folks think more clearly about why these terms are used.

--mattergy