"Opportunity" and "Ebony and Topaz"
Opportunity was most influential in African American literary circles for its literary contests, which ran between 1924-1927, and helped to strengthen the reputations of important writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen. The contests were also accompanied by award dinners, which were often quite glamorous, and featured many writers, publishers, and patrons. Countee Cullen was closey involved as a literary editor during these years, and regularly published columns reviewing other poets' work. A fair amount of poetry white poets who were white was also published in these years.
In 1928, a special anthology appeared called Ebony and Topaz: A Collecteana, edited by Charles Johnson. Its title page indicates that it was "Published by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life," and it seems appropriate to think of it as a special one-off literary issue of Opportunity.
In 1928, Charles Johnson was appointed as President of Fisk University, a Historically Black university. At that time, the editorship shifted, as did the priorities of the journal. After 1928, the magazine was more narrowly focused on sociology and race, and the literary emphasis diminished.