Nationality American Died 1906 | Occupation Political Activist | |
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Sarah Dudley Pettey was an African American political activist in North Carolina devoted to the causes of gender and racial equality, temperance, and women's participation in the public sphere. Dudley Pettey represents female political activism at a time of spreading white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Elizabeth Lundeen writes of Dudley Pettey's views, "Sarah Dudley Pettey’s promotion of women’s public work and middle-class values served as an inspiration to subsequent black leaders who fought to secure improvements, however meager, for African Americans during the nadir of race relations in North Carolina."
Life
Sarah Dudley Pettey was born in 1869 in New Bern, North Carolina. Dudley attended New Bern Public Schools through the sixth grade. She next attended the New Bern State Colored Normal School. At the age of thirteen she attended Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina, a school staffed and taught by northern white teachers. She graduated from Scotia in 1883 and returned to New Bern to teach.
Dudley married Charles Pettey in 1889. Pettey had two daughters with Lula Pickenpack, Dudley's roommate at Scotia. After Lula died, Dudley and Pettey married. Charles Pettey was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. They had 5 children of their own.
In 1896, Sarah Dudley Pettey became involved in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. Also in 1896, she began writing a bimonthly column in the Star of Zion, the newspaper of the AME Zion church.
In her writings, Sarah Dudley Pettey exhibited a progressive vision of women's rights and equality. Historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore notes that Dudley Pettey often traveled and preached with her husband, and "deliver a speech on woman's rights, either 'Woman the Equal of Man' or 'Woman's Suffrage...' Dudley Pettey regularly reported in the Star of Zion on women's accomplishments."
Charles Pettey died in 1900, and Sarah Dudley Pettey died in 1906 at age thirty seven. Their deaths coincided with the establishment of the Jim Crow system and the full disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South.