Jeanne L. Noble

Jeanne Laveta Noble (July 18, 1926 – October 17, 2002) was an American educator who served on education commissions for three U.S. presidents. Noble was the first to analyze and publish the experiences of African American women in college. She served as president of the Delta Sigma Theta (DST) sorority within which she founded that group's National Commission on Arts and Letters. Noble was the first African-American board member of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and the first to serve the U.S. government's Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS). She headed the Women's Job Corps Program in the 1960s, and was the first African-American woman to be made full professor at the New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Grandmother Brown stressed to Noble the importance of education. During her childhood, Noble attended an Episcopal church favored by her mother.

Noble earned a B.A. degree in psychology and sociology from Howard University in 1946. It won the Pi Lambda Theta, National Association for Women in Education Research Award.

With her doctorate in hand, Noble was hired by New York University in 1959 as an associate professor teaching at the Center for Human Relations in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, a school of sociology.

From 1960 to 1963 Noble served on the Defense Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1962 she was part-time director of Training for the Harlem Domestic Peace Corps. She was appointed to the Committee on Federal Employment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1963. She was also on the board of directors of the Urban League of Greater New York, the Girl Scouts of the US, and the National Social Welfare Assembly. Later presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford also asked Noble to serve on educational and investigative commissions.

In 1972 Noble took a leave of absence from NYU to function as executive vice president of the National Council of Negro Women under a grant from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Around 1975 Noble moved from NYU to Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where she taught in the education department, eventually becoming a professor of guidance and counseling in the graduate school. In 1973 with Roscoe Lee Browne she produced Roses and Revolutions, a record album funded by DST. In 1976, Noble produced Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters: A History of the Black Woman in America, a "psychosocial montage" based on her research on African American women.

Noble also ventured into television in the 1970s. She won a regional Emmy Award for her New York-area television program The Learning Experience which she wrote and moderated; it aired weekly on WCBS-TV in the 1970s. In 1979, Noble co-hosted the TV program Straight Talk. Natalie Cole appeared in an anti-drug abuse public service spot produced by Noble.

Final years In 1984 Noble signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion in support of women's rights to abortion, noting her affiliation with the National Assembly of Religious Women. Noble was active in the Episcopal church in New York City. In the 1990s, she was named professor emeritus of Brooklyn College and of the City University of New York's Graduate Center. In 1996 Noble helped to launch the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute of the National Council of Negro Women with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The institute was conceived to foster a cadre of young leaders to assist traditional African-American women's organizations to meet the challenges of the 21st century. For a variety of reasons, the institute was not able to sustain funding once its initial three-year grant was exhausted.

On October 17, 2002, Noble died at New York University Medical Center of congestive heart failure.