Race relations appear to be more strained recently, what with the Black Lives Matter movement that accelerated due to several tragic incidences involving the deaths of Black people.

It used to be a lot worse.

Therefore, we believe it’s important to recall historic milestones in race relations, be they good or bad.

On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorsed “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

According to history.com, the case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger, Homer Plessy, refused to sit in a car for Black people.

Plessy was of mixed race, describing himself as “seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood.”

Apparently that one-eighth was enough to get him arrested and jailed after taking a vacant seat in a whites-only car.

The Supreme Court, in rejecting Plessy’s valid argument that his constitutional rights were violated, ruled that a law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between white people and Black people was not unconstitutional.

Restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race then became common.

The “separate but equal” concept went on for years.

However, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which held that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal, and therefore unconstitutional.

Supreme Court decisions, unfortunately, don’t always change culture and people’s minds.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute has some background about a particularly troubling incident.

The school board of Little Rock, Arkansas, voted to desegregate the city’s high schools beginning in 1957, but on Sept. 4 of that year, a white mob gathered in front of Central High School, and the state’s governor, Orval Faubus, deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the Black students from entering.

A team of lawyers, including future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, won a federal district court injunction to prevent the governor’s blocking of the students’ entry.

The students eventually entered the school through a side entrance on Sept. 23, 1957, but fearing for their safety, they were rushed home soon afterward.

King then contacted President Dwight Eisenhower to uge him to take a stand. The president ordered troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to protect the students, who were shielded by federal troops and the Arkansas National Guard for the rest of the school year.

Faubus closed all four of Little Rock’s public schools before they opened in 1958, but in December 1959, the Supreme Court ruled that the school board must resume the school desegregation process.

We can argue that such incidents wouldn’t happen today, but we still see racial problems surface, such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who was fired after the incident. That officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted in April on several charges, including second-degree murder.

People should make note of landmark decisions, both good and bad, that have paved the way for racial relations to this day, which still have a lot of room for improvement.

And they should learn from those decisions.