Tom, thanks for posting these newsletters. I had no idea that Memphis, once a jewel in the crown of southern cities, had become so violent.
Poverty, lack of economic opportunity, culture, failed educational systems, gangs, and drug sales to finance the gangs, are reasons that cities like Memphis, St. Louis, Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, Detroit, etc. are so violent. Cities have become a breeding ground of a society with a lower class that is often immersed in economic misery, welfare dependency, and violence, while an upper class lives pretty well among the ruins by separating their institutions, homes, schooling, shops, jobs, etc. from the lower classes through formal and informal boundaries. The middle class is largely absent from such places due to lack of education/violence in schools and the inability to afford private education and affordable safe housing.
If you read history, similar factors existed in Great Britain when the Enclosure Act dispossessed tenant farmers who flocked to the cities for some sort of miserable life. Hogarth's print Gin Lane during this time, portrays the squalid misery in British cities when the choice of drug at the time was cheap gin.
