In early 1968, more than 27,000 teachers across Florida mailed their resignation letters, initiating the country’s first statewide teachers’ strike. The striking teachers fought for and won a monumental victory, improving education in the state and gaining collective bargaining rights for all public sector employees. Even as the influence of industrial labor unions decreased across the country, the Florida teachers’ strike and the spirit of teacher militancy that swept the nation during the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrate that a vibrant labor movement remained. Jody Baxter Noll’s study challenges the prevailing view of these decades as a period of decline for the American labor movement by turning the spotlight on teachers and public sector unionism.
In his examination of the 1968 strike and its aftermath, Noll illuminates the vital role of teachers in shaping political and social policy in the United States. As a predominantly women-led workforce, teachers challenged notions of feminine passivity in their mobilization efforts and used their union to fight for gender equality. The strike also provides insight into how interracial unionism could be a potent weapon for labor movements, even in the Deep South.
In exploring the political and social factors that prompted the teachers’ strike, Noll considers Florida’s instrumental role in forming modern conservatism. Led by Republican governor Claude Kirk, the first Republican governor elected in the Deep South since Reconstruction, Florida helped to create a blueprint for Republicans to build a New Right powerhouse throughout the country. Though Florida has remained on the periphery of much scholarship on the ascendancy of the New Right, Noll demonstrates that the state more accurately reflects the nation’s political attitudes than much of the rest of the South because of its economic, racial, social, and political diversity.