1939

Dunham's company presented this landmark concert of Caribbean and Black American dance forms rooted in her anthropological fieldwork in the Caribbean, launching her professional career and introducing the Dunham Technique — which synthesized African diasporic movement vocabulary with Western concert dance — to New York audiences.

Just's major scientific monograph synthesized decades of research on egg cell fertilization and the role of the cell surface in development, advancing theories that anticipated later discoveries in cell biology. It was a landmark contribution produced despite the racial exclusion that forced Just to conduct most of his research in Europe.

After the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow contralto Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial. An audience of 75,000 attended and millions more listened by radio, making it one of the most powerful symbolic moments of the civil rights era.

After Columbia refused the song, Holiday recorded Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem for Commodore Records on April 20, 1939. She performed it at Café Society in New York — insisting the room go silent — making it the closing number every night. Time magazine later named it Song of the Century.

Savage was commissioned to create a work for the 1939 New York World's Fair — one of few Black artists so honored. Her 16-foot plaster sculpture depicted a choir of Black children arranged as harp strings, with a hand rising to play them. It was destroyed after the fair; no permanent cast was made.

Café Society in Greenwich Village, founded by Barney Josephson as New York's first racially integrated nightclub, was where Holiday first performed Strange Fruit. The club itself was a landmark in integration, hosting Black and white performers and audiences together when most American entertainment venues were segregated.

Marine biologist Ernest Everett Just published his landmark monograph arguing that the cell surface plays a central role in development and heredity, decades ahead of mainstream recognition of membrane biology. Despite facing severe racial discrimination in American academia, Just produced foundational research that shaped modern cell biology.

A.G. Gaston of Birmingham, Alabama built one of the most significant Black business empires in the South during the 1940s, expanding from his Booker T. Washington Burial Insurance Company (founded 1923) to add a business college (1947), a motel (later used as civil rights movement headquarters), and a savings bank — all serving a segregated Black consumer market denied access to white institutions. By the 1950s he was a millionaire.

A haunting protest against lynching becomes one of the most powerful songs in American history.

The only Black woman commissioned for the 1939 New York World's Fair unveils her 16-foot sculpture.