This paper will examine competing discourses of black internationalism between Senegalese, Nigerian, and African American cultural organizations from 1956-1969, as a way to understand the appeal of non-state languages of political belonging in Africa. Analyzing the variety of ‘cultural Pan-Africanism’ and ‘black cultural nationalism,’ represented by the Dakar-based Society of African Culture (SAC), an umbrella organization with affiliate chapters in Nigeria (NIGERSAC) and the US (AMSAC), it will reconstruct the debates and tensions between these organizations over the best way to pursue the solidarity of ‘Negro-African’ people during decolonization and desegregation. Their approach emphasized black cultural solidarity, as a distinct ‘Negro-African’ cultural identity that united African-descended peoples in a diasporic political community, and that was enacted by activities in the cultural sphere (journals, publishing, congresses, and festivals). By critically examining the US-centric mode of understanding black internationalism, which marginalizes and misinterprets African politics through the lens of American racial categories, this paper instead adopts an approach that centers and attends to the granularity of African political experiences. It will ultimately reveal the way in which black internationalist projects were negotiated through multiple fields of political belonging: a local politics of national and post-imperial citizenship managed by the state, and an internationalist politics of ‘black cultural citizenship,’ a racially-rooted, culturalist sense of political belonging that invoked more complex territorial associations. In so doing, it hopes to mediate between transnational and local frames not to diminish the importance of either but demonstrate how African politics could also develop along multiple territorial and institutional scales. By attending to this transnational institutionalism and the contestation between competing visions of black cultural citizenship, this paper hopes to contribute to the recovery of historic forms of ‘African internationalism’ that were animated by the normative goal of liberation for all African-descended people.