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. Noble wrote several books including The Negro Woman's College Education and Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters. Early life and education Jeanne Laveta Noble was born in Albany, Georgia on July 18, 1926, the first child of Floyd and Aurelia Noble. After three boys were born to the couple, Floyd Noble left his family around 1930 or 1931. Child-rearing duties fell to Aurelia Noble, who operated a custom drapery business and taught drapery making at the Albany Area Vocational School, and her mother Maggie Brown, a first grade teacher. 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. Her adviser was E. Franklin Frazier, and her teachers included Alain LeRoy Locke and Sterling Allen Brown. From Howard, Noble went to Columbia University and earned an M.A. in 1948. Returning home, she taught summer school at Albany State College. Later she said of the experience, "I fell in love with teaching and never left [the field]." After two years Albany State, Noble accepted a position as dean of women at Langston University in Oklahoma. Two years later, she re-enrolled at Columbia University to pursue a doctorate. With a grant from Pi Lambda Theta, she studied black college women and analyzed data relative to their backgrounds, educations, and achievements. In 1955 she earned her doctorate in educational psychology and counseling. She studied for a time in England at the University of Birmingham. Career For her dissertation and first book, The Negro Woman's College Education (published