Jeanne Noble was a United States expert on education who held various administrative posts under three presidents. She also served on many boards and commissions, was active in the media, and authored several books.
Background
Jeanne Laveta Noble was born on July 18, 1926, in West Palm Beach, Florida, United States. She was the eldest of four children - one girl and three boys - of Aurelia and Floyd Noble. Jeanne Noble's father disappeared when she was four or five years old, leaving the task of child-rearing to her mother and grandmother, Maggie Brown, who taught first grade in the same classroom for fifty years. Aurelia Noble moved the family to Albany, Georgia, where she operated a custom drapery business and taught drapery making at the Albany Area Vocational School. While Noble's mother envisioned a "good marriage" for her daughter, Noble's grandmother encouraged her to pursue a career so that she could provide for herself. Maggie Brown had a florist shop where she worked each day after teaching school. The florist shop was run by Noble's brother William. Jeanne Noble said in a July 1993 interview that "there was a special chemistry between my grandmother and me," especially since Noble's mother was very young and "more like a sister." Not only was Maggie Brown the youngster's role model, but she managed to keep the family from experiencing avoid need and want.
In one of the interviews, Noble reflected on her childhood, especially her involvement in the Episcopal Church, in which her mother was very active. With some humor and regret, she recounted her childhood visit to a Caucasian camp in Sea Islands, Georgia. Since she had always attended African-American camps, she assumed that she was to take part in activities with Caucasian children. However, she realized her mistake when she was sent home, being described as "too forward" by the camp leaders for having participated. This episode was traumatic for the youngster, who, bewildered by racism, abandoned the church for many years.
Education
Jeanne Noble always wanted to attend a "black college" the only ones with which she was familiar. She described herself as a very "provincial" college student who refused to take classes from Caucasian professors. Instead, she sought out such illustrious teachers as E. Franklin Frazier (her advisor), Alain Locke, and Sterling Brown; all three contributed to the intense intellectual activity at Howard University. Much to Noble's surprise, her true intellectual powers were awakened when she enrolled in a humanities course taught by a Caucasian Quaker theologian. According to Noble, the Quaker saw her as a gifted student. Under his influence, Noble changed her attitude toward Caucasian people. She expressed regret that she had failed early on to adopt a "more gestalt attitude" toward the "white world." She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Howard University in 1946.
Noble pursued a master's degree at Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1948. After obtaining her master's degree, Noble decided to become a teacher when she met the president of historically "black" Albany State College, in Albany, Georgia, who asked her to teach Albany State College summer school. According to Noble, she fell in love with teaching and never left. After four years working as a teacher and dean, she returned to Columbia University in 1952 and was awarded her doctorate in educational psychology and counseling in 1955. For her dissertation and first book, The Negro Woman College Graduate (published in 1956), Noble examined the lives of 1,000 African-American women graduates who had been out of college for at least five years. An early nonfiction book written by an African-American woman about African-American women for a Caucasian audience, it was one of the first studies to consider gender in concert with race. Later she also attended graduate courses at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. In 1991, Jeanne noble earned an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Bennett College, Greensboro, North Carolina.
Career
Jeanne Noble taught at Albany State College (now University) from 1948 to 1950. In 1950, she accepted the position of dean of women at Langston University, another historically "black school," where she worked from 1950 to 1952. When the president of Langston University, Lamar Harrison, asked her to become a dean, she at first demurred, thinking that the job consisted only of being a disciplinarian and "sending home pregnant girls." As it turned out, Noble very much enjoyed her work at Langston, where she also sat on the administrative council. Joining New York University's faculty in 1959, she was an instructor at that school's Center for Human Relations; she later became a professor at the Graduate Center, retiring as professor emeritus. During her career, Noble also was a summer visiting professor at the University of Vermont and Tuskegee Institute (now University) in Alabama. In 1996, she 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.
Jeanne Noble is the author or co-author of several books that give evidence of her dedication to the field of education. Her book, College Education as Personal Development, was co-written with Margaret Fisher, then dean of South Florida University. Noble described this book as "speaking to freshmen" in a freshman orientation course. She and Fisher wanted students to know the value of a liberal arts education. The Negro Woman College Graduate examines the education of four hundred African-American women who had four years or more of a college education. In the book, Nobel says, "College offers a student fresh opportunities to team, to explore new ideas about himself, to modify those he already has." Besides her interest in promoting education for African-American women, Noble was also interested in "black history" in general, and toward this end, she wrote Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters: A History of the Black Woman in America. The title paraphrases a Langston Hughes poem. The book grew out of research on African American women that Noble had been doing. In the July 1993 interview, she described Beautiful, Also, as "a more psycho-social look at black women than a history of black women." The book, Noble said, is a "montage" of African-American women, ranging from the single parent to the singers, such as those in church choirs, who have told the story of African-American women through song, to the African-American woman writer. Noble added that at the time she was writing Beautiful, Also, African American writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison were gaining prominence, as were African-American women's organizations.
Also active in the media, Jeanne Noble produced a record album, Roses and Revolutions, for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority in 1973. With Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, she coproduced the video 75 Years in Retrospect and a public service announcement on drug abuse featuring Natalie Cole. She was cohost of Straight Talk, a weekly television show that ran the summer of 1979, and a professor on The Learning Experience, a weekly educational show on WCBS television that aired in New York for five years.
Jeanne Noble held a number of consultantships. She was a part of the Robert Havighurst Study of the Chicago School System and acted as a consultant on school desegregation programs in Norwalk, Connecticut; Philadelphia; Miami; Seattle; Bridgeton and Teaneck, New Jersey; and Boston. She was also a consultant for Fordham University's Program for the Development of Black and Puerto Rican Principals. In the corporate world, she served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation's Social and Economic Development Division on Special Projects; Exxon Corporation; and Mutual of New York Insurance Company's Affirmative Action Plans and Staff Training. She was a board member of the Federal Trust Bank.
Jeanne Noble served on various government commissions at the requests of the United States presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. In 1964, she accepted the invitation of Sargent Shriver, then a director of the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity, to head a committee to develop plans for a Girls' Job Corps, a component of the federal antipoverty program. She worked for five months on a 40-page plan to increase jobs for girls and women aged 16 to 21; a demographic that was vulnerable and in great need of employment. Noble recommended to Johnson that a woman should be named a director of the program. Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford also asked Noble to serve on educational and investigative commissions. She worked on the National Education Professions Development Commission, the Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Services, the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, and the Commission of Presidential Scholars. Other government appointments include the UNESCO Commission, Bicentennial Commission, Advisory Panel on Essentials for Effective Minority Programming, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman appointed her to the Joint Committee to Study the Extension Services of the Department of Agriculture, and she was later appointed to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (1960-1963). She was appointed to the Committee on Federal Employment of the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1963. In 1967, she was a director of training for the Harlem Domestic Peace Corps, on a part-time loan from New York University. Outside the federal arena, she served on the American Council of Education's Commission on the College Student and chaired the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors' Research Committee.
Noble was active with a number of other organizations. She served as a member on the boards of the Urban League of Greater New York, the Haryou Act, and the International Center for Integrative Studies. She was a national board member of Girl Scouts of the United States and for twelve years served the scouts as a member of the Executive Committee, assistant secretary, and the United States delegate to the World Assembly in Denmark. Noble served on the board of trustees of Marymount Manhattan College in New York and of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. For six years, she served on the Board of Governors of Common Cause, and she served as a member of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. She joined the Women's Africa Committee and attended the Conference on Women of Africa and African Descent in Ghana as a delegate from the committee. A former national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Noble was the youngest person ever elected to that post. Later, she was the first chair of the sorority's National Commission on Arts and Letters and worked with the commission as it conducted a study for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting designed to devise ways to increase African-American viewership of public broadcasting. She was also a national vice-president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Religion
Jeanne Noble was very active in the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in New York City: she was a member of the vestry and a lay reader. In 1984, she 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.
Views
Jeanne Noble believed that African-Americans needed to regain a sense of being an "organized community" by relying once again on such voluntary organizations as clubs and sororities whose good works were only sporadic. She also saw the need for parents to take a more active part in their children's educations while presenting them with true heroes or heroines African-Americans "living life." According to Noble, the younger generation was attracted only to celebrities such as rap singers and sports stars. True champions of African-American culture, such as author Toni Morrison, were hard to sell to the young.
Personality
Jeanne Noble was forceful, candid, and persuasive. She radiated the self-confidence that has obviously propelled her throughout her distinguished career. She was in touch with the past and what it could teach as well as with the present and what it could offer.