The United States Supreme Court had ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional in 1883. By the time of the convention the groundwork was laid for decades of segregation. On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington, an accommodationist, had given the Atlanta Exposition Speech, at the Cotton States and International Exposition. He was revered by followers and had critics such as William Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. Du Bois. An agreement was reached between black and white leaders that blacks would submit to white political rule in exchange for a guarantee of receiving basic education and due process in law. By 1890, Jim Crow Laws replaced black codes with a separate but equal status for black people. The United States Supreme Court Decision of "Plessy v. Ferguson" in 1896, stemming from the arrest of Homer Plessy in 1892, upheld racial segregation. Article 248 provided for free public separate schools, for "white and colored" races.