Sarah Dudley Pettey (1869-1906) was an African-American educator, writer, organist, and political activist in North Carolina.

She devoted her life and career to increasing gender and racial equality, Christian temperance, and women's participation in the state's public sphere during the Jim Crow era.

At the age of thirteen, she attended Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina, a school staffed and taught by northern white teachers.

Historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore notes that Dudley Pettey often traveled and preached with her husband, speaking in on “'Woman the Equal of Man' or 'Woman's Suffrage...'.

Their deaths coincided with the establishment of the Jim Crow system and the full disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South.