The Florida Education Association (FEA) is a statewide federation of teacher and education workers' labor unions in the US state of Florida. Its 145,000 members make it the largest union in the state. It is a merged affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), and is a member of the AFL–CIO. The FEA was founded in 1886. After leading the nation's first statewide teachers' strike in 1968, the FEA split into two separate federations in 1974. The two groups merged again in 2000. Early history The Florida Education Association was established in 1886 as an affiliate of the NEA. It was an association rather than a labor union, and membership was initially limited to white teachers and administrators only. FEA worked to persuade school boards and the public to increase funding for schools, end discrimination against married female schoolteachers, and more. Local affiliates of the FEA formed in almost every school district. However, membership remained low and varied widely from district to district, even though dues were not high. FEA, like much of the NEA at the time, was dominated by administrators rather than rank-and-file teachers. The administrators' influence often kept FEA from being an effective advocate for classroom teachers. But in larger school districts, the FEA was somewhat successful in obtaining occasional salary increases, improvements to facilities, and curriculum changes. However the FEA in its early years was seen more as a proponent of white teachers specifically. They opposed the efforts of African-American teachers to sue for salary equalization in the 1940s, with their frequent petitions of interventions designed to delay the outcomes of many cases that eventually prevented schools from maintaining separate unequal salary schedule for white and black teachers. Beginning of the modern era The modern era of the FEA can be traced to 1963. In that year, Pat Tornillo, a teacher in the Dade County school system, ran for the presidency of the Dade County Classroom Teachers Association (DCCTA). Tornillo won office by calling for greater organizational militancy and the desegregation of teaching staffs. Tornillo's election was indicative of a wave of militancy in the NEA. Since its inception, the NEA had rejected collective bargaining and strikes as unprofessional. But after the AFT won collective bargaining rights for teachers in New York City and formed the United Federation of Teachers, many NEA members began to push for the association