Jeanne Noble

• In Event: 16.028 - "Outrageous, Audacious, Courageous": Writing "Womanist" Biography in Education

Abstract

Jeanne Noble (1926 – 2002) conceptualized her academic career as an avenue for promoting gender and racial equality. Born in Albany, Georgia in 1926, she attended Howard University and then earned her master’s degree in guidance and counseling at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. She served briefly as Dean of Women at Albany State College before returning to Columbia to complete her Ph.D. in 1955. Noble earned tenure and achieved the rank of full professor at New York University and later joined the faculty at Brooklyn College. Straddling the worlds of academe and activism, Noble brought the insights of history, the methods of social science, and the political consciousness of the civil rights movement to her work with Black female youth and leadership of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated and the National Congress of Negro Women.

Archival research informed by the secondary literature on Black Women’s history and the double lens of race and gender drives the writing of Noble’s educational history. Primary documents used were the Jeanne Noble Papers at the Sophia Smith Collection and Noble’s own educational writings and speeches.

Noble’s personal experiences as an educated Black Woman, her political understanding of Black Women’s status in American society, and her academic background in student personnel work and Black Women’s history shaped her scholarship and her pioneering work developing leadership programs for young Black college Women.

Scholars have documented the careers of an early generation of Black Women who pioneered in founding educational organizations and institutions, like Mary Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, and Anna Julia Cooper. This study of Jeanne Noble contributes toward broadening our portrait of Black Women educators and helps extend the timeline of understanding Black Women’s push for gender and racial equality through a study of a university academic in the post-Brown era.

Author

• Andrea Walton, Indiana University