Changing the text color of a Bootstrap dropdown item

Question

I'm trying to change the color of a dropdown menu's elements. The dropdown is made with the following HTML:

<div class="btn-group">
    <a class="btn">Confirm</a>
    <a href="#" id="drop_thought" role="button" class="dropdown-toggle btn white-text" data-toggle="dropdown">v</a>
    <ul class="dropdown-menu white-text" id="tools_drop" role="menu" aria- labelledby="drop_thought">
        <li><a class="btn btn-success white-text">Okay</a></li>
        <li><a class="btn btn-warning">Unload</a></li>
        <li><a class="btn btn-danger">Quarantine</a></li>
        <li class="divider"></li>
        <li><a class="btn btn-primary">Permanent</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

I've erased the IDs for easy reading.

I made a CSS class like the following:

.white-text {
    color: #FFFFFF; !important
}

I thought the !important would automatically make the Okay into white, but it's still black. I looked at the enclosed <li><a>...</a></li> element with white-text under Chrome's developer console and it seems that .dropdown-menu a is the class it's inheriting from. For some reason, my white-text is ignored and has a strike through.

Using the following CSS, I was able to change the text color to white, but I'm using dropdowns in another place, so I can't use this:

.dropdown-menu a{
    color: #FFFFFF; !important
}

Here's the inheritance chain according to Chrome:

.dropdown-menu li > a:hover, .dropdown-menu li > a:focus, .dropdown-submenu:hover > a - #ffffff
.btn-success:hover, .btn-success:active, .btn-success.active, .btn-success.disabled, .btn-success[disabled] - #ffffff
.btn:hover - #333333
.btn:hover, .btn:active, .btn.active, .btn.disabled, .btn[disabled] - #333333 .dropdown-menu a - #333333
a:hover - #005580
.white-text - #FFFFFF
.btn-success - #ffffff
.btn - #333333
a - #0088cc
.white-text - #FFFFFF
body - #333333

Answer 1

The semi-colon goes after the !important, otherwise it won't be included in that property (CSS doesn't deal with white space/returns).

Correct use:

.dropdown-menu a{
    color: #FFFFFF !important;
}

http://css-tricks.com/when-using-important-is-the-right-choice/