January 1928

In 1928, Oscar De Priest of Chicago was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first African American elected to Congress in the 20th century and the first ever from outside the South. During his three terms he was the only Black member of Congress, organized fundraisers for the NAACP, introduced resolutions investigating Capitol Hill segregation, and fought to allow Black preachers to deliver the House's opening prayer.

Nella Larsen published 'Quicksand' in 1928, a psychologically sophisticated novel about Helga Crane, a biracial woman searching for identity in Harlem, Copenhagen, and the American South. The novel won the Harmon Foundation Bronze Medal for literature and was praised by W.E.B. Du Bois. 'Quicksand' stands alongside 'Passing' as a foundational text of Black women's literary modernism, exploring interior experience with unprecedented honesty.

Claude McKay's novel 'Home to Harlem' (1928) became the first novel by a Black American author to reach the national bestseller list. The novel's frank portrayal of working-class Black Harlem—its jazz clubs, sexuality, and street life—established the legitimacy of gritty realism in Black fiction alongside the more genteel Harlem Renaissance tradition.

Claude McKay's novel 'Home to Harlem,' published in 1928, became the first novel by a Black American author to reach the national bestseller list. The novel's frank portrayal of working-class Black Harlem—its jazz clubs, sexuality, and street life—divided opinion within the Black community (Du Bois famously said it made him feel unclean) but established the legitimacy of gritty realism in Black fiction alongside the more genteel Harlem Renaissance tradition.

Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues, cut her last recordings for Paramount in 1928 and retired from professional recording by the early 1930s, returning to Georgia. Her body of work — over 100 recordings — established the template for classic blues singing and profoundly influenced every blues and soul singer who followed.

In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston graduated from Barnard College—one of the first Black women to receive a degree from the college—and was awarded a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship for two years of graduate study in anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas. Her field work collecting African American folklore from the Jim Crow South would produce 'Mules and Men' (1935), a foundational text of Black cultural anthropology.

In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston graduated from Barnard College—one of the first Black women to receive a degree from the college—and was awarded a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship for two years of graduate study in anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas. Her field work collecting African American folklore would produce the foundational text 'Mules and Men' (1935).

McKay's bestseller becomes one of the most widely read novels by a Black author to that date.