You could actually look at Tennessee even closer and see that the higher murder rate is probably a great deal due to the Memphis region alone, as I believe the Nashville (central) and Knoxville (eastern) regions have only low to moderate violent crime rates in comparison.
The
census site has the ethnicities, and you can get the crime stats from various sources, and
this link shows you how to do a regression analysis in excel if anyone wants to have fun with this. Do your own analysis and don't rely on the lying media to give you (mostly false and distorted) information