in 1956), Noble examined the lives of 1,000 African-American women graduates who had been out of college at least five years. An early nonfiction book written by an African-American woman about African-American women for a white audience, it was one of the first studies to consider gender in concert with race. Pioneering educator Esther Lloyd-Jones wrote the foreword to this ground-breaking, progressive work. It won the Pi Lambda Theta, National Association for Women in Education Research Award. The next year, she published a summary in The Journal of Negro Education, titled "Negro Women Today and Their Education". 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. In 1960 Noble and co-author Margaret Fisher, the dean of South Florida University, published College Education as Personal Development to be used in college orientation courses by first-year college students. When Noble advanced to full professor, she said that she was probably the first African-American female to do so at a major university primarily catering to white students. Other lecturer positions Noble held during her career included summer visiting professorships at the University of Vermont and at the Tuskegee Institute. She also served as assistant dean of students at City College of New York, a counseling position. Outside of the classroom, Noble served on many boards and commissions. From 1958 to 1963 Noble was the national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a public service organization she joined while an undergraduate at Howard University. Noble later served Delta as Chair of its Arts and Letters, and Rituals and Ceremonies Commissions. Before taking the presidency she responded as vice president with financial assistance and moral support to the Little Rock Nine. Later, as president, she helped DST work to desegregate her hometown, Albany. Under her leadership, DST opened a chapter in Liberia and sponsored a maternity wing in a remote Kenyan hospital. She instituted new programs such as the "Teen Lift" mentors and the Commission on Arts and Letters. As she passed the baton to her successor, Ebony magazine named her "one of the 100 most influential Negroes of the Emancipation Centennial Year [1963]." From 1960 to 1963 Noble served on the Defense Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1962 she