Abstract: As national president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Dorothy Height maintained a visible, though marginalized, position within civil rights leadership. While studies have recovered her contributions to the domestic civil rights struggle, her six-week, five-country tour of West Africa in 1960, studying the training and leadership needs of West African women, demonstrates that the international dimensions of her activism remain under-examined. I argue that under Dorothy Height's administration, NCNW's internationalism in the early period of African decolonization embraced on-the-ground engagement as a means of expanding black women's sphere of leadership still hampered in the US by racial and gendered limitations. While their anticommunism in the Cold War shaped their engagement in the international arena, their encounters with African women leaders also influenced how they came to understand support for African decolonization. This assessment expands our understanding of the gendered dimensions of civil rights, African decolonization, and the Cold War, and provides tools to better understand the complexities of black women's internationalism.
