I'm curious if you know if in the south there were tensions, or perhaps why there weren't as many, as say in the west coast like the 1886 Seattle Riot or the Rock Springs Massacre, beyond just the reaction from the exclusion act?
I believe Loewen's argument is that Chinese ran the grocery stores, and because whites viewed merchant labor as distasteful (they all wanted to be agrarian landowners, even poor whites) Chinese had extra leverage because they were the only group supplying necessary goods in these small rural towns.
A case that established Chinese exclusion from white schools (Lum v. Rice, 1924) came out of Rosedale, just north of the town of Greenville mentioned in the article, when a white public school did not permit a Chinese grocer's daughter to enroll. Interestingly, the lower county court ruled against the school district and upheld the Chinese girl's right to attend the white school. The decision was subsequently overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court and US Supreme Court in favor of the school district. It's telling that the court closest to the case ruled in favor of the Chinese: these merchant families had economic leverage in their communities because they filled a role that white planters needed but disdained for themselves. A town that treated its Chinese unfairly might soon find itself with no place to buy canned goods.
There is a similar story for Jewish immigrants, who ran (and in some cases whose decedents still run) the general/department stores in these Delta towns. The oldest synagogue in Mississippi is in -- you guessed it -- Greenville.
