“Spain’s Queen of Soul”: Donna Hightower and Black Women’s Internationalism during the 1960s–1980s

Abstract

Donna Hightower (1926–2013) was an African American jazz expatriate who emigrated to Spain in the late 1960s and settled there until the mid-1990s. At first glance, Hightower’s international tours and musical career in Spain seem unrelated to the broader Black Freedom Struggle. She independently traveled throughout Europe without assistance from other Black jazz expatriates and intentionally disassociated herself from major civil rights and Black Power organizations. However, a closer examination of her life and influence in Spain highlights the diverse ways Black women participated in global politics and cultural diplomacy in the late twentieth century. This article argues that Hightower engaged in three forms of Black internationalism—political activism, public self-fashioning, and Black religious expression—in order to challenge existing social structures in the United States and Spain. In the process, she denounced American racism, uplifted African American religious practices, and presented alternative representations of Black womanhood on a global scale.