Jeanne L. Noble

Who was Jeanne L. Noble?

Jeanne Laveta Noble was an innovative African-American educator who served on education commissions for three U.S. presidents. Noble was the first to analyze and publish the experiences of female African Americans in college. She served as president of the Delta Sigma Theta 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. 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.

Noble wrote several books including The Negro Woman's College Education and Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters. In 1973 with Roscoe Lee Browne she produced Roses and Revolutions, a record album funded by DST. 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.