The General Assembly of Tennessee at Nashville should reinforce, strengthen, tighten, or intensify its control against the city of Memphis and Shelby County in Tennessee. It is our strong argument.
We don’t try or want to make this argument not because the General Assembly of Tennessee is, morally, politically, or logically, perfect. There must, may, or can exist some type of corruption, incompetence, incapacity, immoral activities, or even illegality there, too.
However, the level of corruption and crime here in Memphis and Shelby County already had reached the limit of one’s patience. Not only there exist serious issues of corruption and crime, but also the judicial and political leaders don’t have autonomous capacity here. That is the point.
People tend to mention such crime of gun violence, car jacking, car theft, or other stealing on the street here in Memphis and Shelby County, but lawyers, police officers or law enforcement ones, or even judges are observed, estimated, or suspected to have been committing serious crime here in these local communities. That is the reality.
Why do such phenomena exist here in these communities? We can’t explain such phenomena without mentioning such history, culture, mentality, and the local demographics of the local communities in the city of Memphis and Shelby County.
The legal jurisdiction in Memphis and Shelby County belongs to the state of Tennessee. However, Tennessee laws do not fit in Memphis and its surrounding areas. In part, it is understandable that one law should apply to the entire state of Tennessee. Each states make their laws, and they should apply to everyone in that each states. But that does not mean that Memphis has its own desirable laws. The laws in Tennessee are made in Nashville. Historically and culturally, the mentality of Memphis is, arguably, more like that of Mississippi. Why?
We suggest or argue that these vocabularies mentioned as below are very important to understand Memphis. They include, but are not limited to the Mississippi Delta (also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta), Memphis metropolitan area (which is also called as the Memphis–Clarksdale–Forrest City Combined Statistical Area, TN–MS–AR (CSA) or Greater Memphis), Southern cotton, Southern landowners, textile industries in the U.S. and Europe, Southern leaders, Southern plantations, enslaved population, significant wealth and capital for the antebellum South, the slogan “Cotton is king”, the laws of the antebellum American South, Confederate States of America, Deep South, the Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation (declared in 1862, and came into effect since January 1, 1863), mass migration to Jackson in Mississippi (because of the geographical proximity), and mass migration to Memphis in Tennessee (because of the geographical proximity), and so on.
We emphasize the historical and cultural sides of BOTH(emphasis added) ‘the had been oppressed’ and ‘the had oppressed’ for the explanations of the realities or actualities of the development of history, and for the fairness, accuracy, and justification of our argument.
The historical, cultural, and moral development in Memphis and Shelby County of Western Tennessee can, may, or must be quite different from that of Nashville of Central Tennessee and Knoxville of Eastern Tennessee.
Memphis had been a cultural place of exploitation, suppression, and coercion for a long time. Such culture has been evolved into legal coercion which still exists in and governs a lot of legal cases in the communities. Corrupt judges and crooked lawyers are suspected to exist at the core of such social problems and legal coercion. It explains almost perfectly why there are or exist so-called so many “schemes” in the specific legal cases. Such schemes exist or can exist even before specific cases are filed in the courts. That is the reality here.
The General Assembly of Tennessee at Nashville should begin to consider making SPECIAL LEGISLATION(emphasis added) to deal with such deplorable phenomena here in Western Tennessee. The General Assembly should reinforce its control against Memphis and Shelby County.
The Editorial of the Memphis Times.
www.memphistimes.org
Published: July 23, 2025, Wednesday (7/23/2025), at 8:11P.M.