As far as Knox County politics goes, the 1st District is as blue as it gets.

A district where President Joe Biden won nearly 90 percent in some precincts draws a quartet of contenders.

Racially diverse and home to the county’s largest African-American population, it covers most of East Knoxville; all of downtown; Lincoln Park; the communities of Mechanicsville, Lonsdale and Beaumont; and west along Middlebrook Pike to Weisgarber Road.

It is not uncommon for precincts in the district to vote 70 percent Democratic or higher — in the 2020 presidential election, some East Knoxville precincts neared 90 percent for President Joe Biden. The last time there was even a Republican on the ballot in a District 1 race was in 2016, when GOP Commission nominee Michael Covington won just 29 percent of the vote.

But this year, the district’s Republican voters will not only have a candidate — they have a primary. And so do the Democrats.

In the 2020 Census, 50.2 percent of District 1 residents were either Black (33.8 percent) or other nonwhite including Hispanic (16.4 percent), making it just barely the county’s only majority-minority district. Political power has tended to be centered around East Knoxville, and the County Commission seat has been won by African-American candidates consistently for decades.

The entire district is within Knoxville city limits, which means city government provides many day-to-day services, including public safety, waste collection and street maintenance. But there are significant county facilities, including schools as well as the downtown governmental complex. It is also home to the new downtown stadium, a joint city-county project currently under construction just east of the Old City.

The seat is open this year because incumbent Commissioner Dasha Lundy decided not to seek a second term. That has attracted interest from across the spectrum. The Democratic primary features former County Commissioner Evelyn Gill, who lost the 2020 primary to Lundy; and local entrepreneur Damon Rawls, who has been endorsed by Lundy.

On the Republican side is Charles Frazier, who has run in the district before, but as a Democrat; and political newcomer Justin Hirst, who was energized by concerns about the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic and by issues of children allegedly being exposed to inappropriate materials.

The winner of each primary will move on to the Aug. 1 county general election.

Rawls leads the pack in fundraising by a wide margin, reporting $6,153 in contributions through Jan. 15. Gill reported $1,150, Frazier reported only a $907.91 loan to himself, and Hirst reported raising $652.40.

Here is a look at the quartet of contenders.

Please note: Portions of this article are quoted from past Compass candidate profiles of Gill and Frazier. You can read those full stories here (Gill) and here (Frazier).

The Democrats: Evelyn Gill

This is the third straight cycle in which Gill has been on the ballot for the 1st District Commission seat. She ran in 2016 and defeated the better-known Rick Staples in the primary before easily beating Covington in the general election. (Staples went on to a short and checkered career in the Legislature.)

In running for a second term in 2020, Gill was challenged in the primary by Lundy, who had support from much of East Knoxville’s Black political leadership. Lundy won with about 53 percent of the vote — the same margin by which Gill had won four years earlier.

Gill now returns for a third round against a third candidate, again facing a primary opponent who has significant support from the Democratic and East Knoxville establishments.  

Gill moved to Knoxville in the 1990s, bringing with her a master’s degree in public administration from Rutgers University. Working as a special education teacher in Knox County schools, she became active in local progressive politics. She ran for the state Senate as a Democrat in 2012, losing to Republican Becky Duncan Massey; Gill won 31 percent of the vote in the heavily Republican district.

She became commissioner with few connections to well-known East Knoxville names, unusual for a 1st District commissioner in recent decades. In her four years on Commission, she remained independent and often unpredictable, not siding consistently with any of the shifting factions on the rest of the body.

Gill made headlines in 2017 when she was first placed on administrative leave from her teaching job and then resigned, after complaints from some parents about her interactions with special education students and concerns from school officials that her Commission position was causing her to miss too much time away from her job.

A lawsuit filed by parents of one student alleging mistreatment by Gill was settled by the county for a reported $93,000. 

Responding to questions sent via email at her request, Gill said that during her term on Commission she had learned to work with others toward common goals.

“There are several important factors that make you an effective Commissioner,” she wrote, “among the most important is being prepared, diplomatic, focused, and prioritizing the needs of your constituents while jointly working with other Commissioners on county wide issues.”

Of accomplishments from her tenure, she said she helped increase funding for District 1 schools, arts and nonprofit organizations, and public health efforts. She also helped with the relocation of the Community Action Committee’s East Knoxville neighborhood center to larger facilities. 

As for what has prompted her to run again, Gill said she wants to continue working on economic investment, housing, schools and infrastructure issues in the 1st District. 

“I am an experienced leader with a proven track record serving and advocating for people in Knox County,” she said.

She said she had taken seriously the role of being the only African-American member of Commission. 

“It is important that all citizens see themselves represented and feel comfortable taking their issues to those representatives,” Gill said. “While things are getting better, there are occasions wherein people of color might find me more approachable than their own commissioner who happens to be Caucasian. While I long for the time when that will not be the case, it isn’t here yet.”

She said District 1 has opportunities for new growth and investment, but it needs to be managed so that current residents benefit.

“This district is not one monolithic area but instead is composed of diverse sub-areas that span from a thriving downtown to adjoining sections that need substantial investment in jobs, transportation, housing and economic development,” Gill said. “One recommendation to address housing in District 1 would be to prioritize economic and community development, expand access to public transportation so people can be connected to jobs that pay a livable wage, and invest in case management services to prevent people from being evicted and becoming homeless.”

She also said she is open to the possibility of a property tax increase, if needed. Knox County has not raised its tax rate in 25 years. “To put it simply, raising taxes has never been popular, but if our current tax rate is inadequate to serve the needs of a rapidly growing population, it would be irresponsible to refuse to consider a tax rate increase,” Gill said. “A rate increase may be needed not just for infrastructure but also for capital improvements in transportation, land management, greenways and a balanced budget.”

Gill’s contributor list includes former County Commissioner Diane Jordan and Jackie Griffin, proprietor of Jackie's Dream. 

The Democrats: Damon Rawls

Rawls grew up in Alabama and earned a degree in finance at Alabama A&M, a historically Black university in Huntsville. He moved to Knoxville 24 years ago with his wife, who was taking a job at the old Goody’s department store chain. More recently, he earned a master’s degree in ethics and leadership at Johnson University in South Knox County.

Rawls runs Innovation Digital, a digital marketing company, and is also the creator of the Knoxville Black Business Directory. The latter project arose during the early days of the pandemic, when Rawls was reading projections that as many as half of Black-owned businesses across the country could go under during the economic disruption. 

“I wanted to do my part in preventing some of that, and so I kind of said to myself, if we had a central location that you could find and connect with Black businesses online, even if they didn't have a website, that could be beneficial,” he said. “So I started building, started putting a website together. That was about three years ago, and right now we're at almost 300 businesses on the page, and 1,700 unique visitors a month.”

His interest in civic and political life goes back further. Rawls has already run for office once, in 2017, but couldn’t get any traction in a 13-way open primary for City Council’s 6th District seat. (It was ultimately won by current Councilwoman Gwen McKenzie.)

He threw himself into local Democratic Party activities, serving as the party’s 1st District representative. He was one of the first people Lundy informed when she decided not to seek a second term.

“When she gave me the call that she wasn’t going to run, we really thought about the district and thought about who could serve in that capacity,” Rawls said. “And it was an opportunity that I decided to take upon myself.”

He acknowledged that many district residents look to the city first for many services, although schools, libraries and public health are all run by the county.

“I think most of the constituents see it as a city issue but want somebody on the county side to care about the community and what's going on,” Rawls said. 

He sees the stadium as an opportunity for the district, noting that in his hometown of Montgomery, Ala., a new stadium served as a catalyst for surrounding development.

“It’s going to happen, it’s moving, so it’s great,” Rawls said. “It’s going to be fine if it’s managed properly. Now, I would like there to be minority participation from the business perspective in the ball field. The Urban League has taken the lead on that in their partnership with the ball field association. So I'm optimistic.”

He said he would push for the county to take a more active role in the 1st District when it can help make a difference, as with the stadium. “We don’t necessarily need to throw up our hands and say, ‘Oh, step back, that’s the city,’” he said. “Let’s find a way to get involved and help that project along. That helps the city and helps the county — we all live in one big community.”

Besides Lundy, Rawls’ more high-profile supporters include former Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero, former county Election Administrator Greg Mackay, the city’s community safety and empowerment officer LaKenya Middlebrook, and local entrepreneur Brandon Bruce.

As a small business owner engaged with the local entrepreneurial community, Rawls said he would like to see county efforts in the district focused most heavily on economic development.

“I would like to see if the county could help with small business development and what ways that can impact,” Rawls said. “Because when you focus on that or when you increase that, you increase job creation. And that increases the tax bases. There are a lot of great things that can come out of business development.”

In the meantime, he’s continuing those kinds of efforts himself on a grassroots basis with the Black Business Directory. 

“We at this point now have a networking meeting once a month, on every first Friday, called Black Coffee, where we’re open to (people) coming in and meeting up and talking about their businesses and just making connections,” Rawls said. “Next year, we’ll probably be launching some workshops as well.”

The Republicans: Charles Frazier

The last time he was on a local ballot, in 2022, Frazier appeared as a Democrat. He ran for the 1st District school board seat in the primary against Rev. John Butler, who won the primary and the election.

Some things haven’t changed since then — Frazier is still a sales executive for East Knoxville-based WJBE radio, and he still does the local broadcasts of football games at Austin-East Magnet High School.

But his party affiliation has, to what Frazier said is a more honest expression of his personal views.

“Really, I’m more of a Republican than anything else,” said Fraizer, who grew up in Knox County and graduated from Carter High School. He has a degree from Logos Divinity School and a long track record of civic engagement, including years ago serving as vice chair of the Knoxville chapter of the NAACP.

“I don’t believe in abortion,” he said. “I believe in small government. My grandfather was a school teacher and a business guy. My father was a business guy. You know, we owned Frazier’s Barbecue for more than three decades. So I’m conservative in nature, I know how important it is to keep up with numbers and balance books.”

One practical issue he said he wants to champion is equality in county hiring. 

“One of the things I have to make sure is that people from the 1st District get employed at the county,” Frazier said. “A gainful job is really important. So that's one of the areas that I will definitely look at and focus on. I have to have a relationship with the clerks, to make sure that people of color and people in the 1st District are represented all through the courthouse.”

He is a big fan of the stadium project — “I’m in support 100 percent, and it’s going to be a beautiful facility” — but he wants to make sure its benefits carry over.

“I want to work with Mr. Randy Boyd to make sure that we share in the employment and in the prosperity of a project — especially a project getting money from the state and from the county,” Frazier said.

He said that growth is likely to continue both from redevelopment inside the district and new development outside it. One concern is that the district attracts the kinds of investment and development residents want to see and not things they don’t. Frazier said 1st District residents sometimes feel like “a dumping ground” for land uses not wanted elsewhere.

“I have to make sure that that doesn't happen, for something that's not appealing to the people of the community and an insult to the community,” he said.

Frazier said he is against raising property taxes, which he said could hurt homeowners in the district already struggling to pay mortgages. But he is an advocate for using property tax incentives like payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs) and tax-increment financing (TIFs) to stimulate development in areas that need it.

“I think anytime that we can give tax breaks for county and city for new projects coming in, I'm in support of doing that,” Frazier said. He pointed to the revitalization of downtown Knoxville over the past 20 years as evidence that that approach works.

And he said that the resurgence has special resonance for those who remember the bustling downtown of earlier eras.

“My grandfather, the school teacher, he sold right downtown on Market Square Mall,” Frazier said. “He was a farmer in Straw Plains and he’d come down in his wagon and he’d sell fruit and products. I love it. I love the downtown area.”

The Republicans: Justin Hirst

Hirst, who is making his first political run, said that he used to be more on the left side of the political spectrum. At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was deeply skeptical of the case for the war and worried about its consequences — concerns that were validated by events.

But over time, he said he started seeing different kinds of untrustworthy claims and campaigns from the left.

“I would see something in the media and then go look at the original source — it didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance,” he said. “So what I found was, I was getting better information from the conservative side of things.”

That seemed especially true to him during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he believes was characterized by government overreach, including at the local level.

“You were seeing a lot of just wildly different viewpoints on things, which to me ultimately I cannot account for that,” Hirst said. “That is an indication that someone is meddling in the body of information that's being put out to the public.”

He has attended County Commission meetings in recent years, and spoken at a few. He said he wants to provide a voice for values on Commission that need more support, including concerns about materials in libraries and at public venues.

Hirst was born in Knoxville and moved around a bit as a child but mostly grew up in the Powell area, where he graduated from high school. He made some forays into college, but what ended up sticking was technical troubleshooting — first working as an auto mechanic, and then as an information technology specialist. He has worked for the last two decades for an industrial X-ray inspection machine manufacturer in Alcoa.

“It’s been a great job, because I didn’t really go into it with any degrees,” Hirst said. “It allowed me to learn how to fix computers or program computers and manage computers and assemble stuff. Then later on, you get these higher-level things like project planning and keeping your information in order and that sort of thing.”

He is concerned about illegal immigration and the “sexualization of children” — on the latter topic, he mentions a resolution brought last fall by County Commissioner Rhonda Lee, which was tabled by the rest of Commission.

“It is an oddly persistent push to put sexual material in front of children at early ages, so that is something I would want to address,” he said. He said, for example, that county government should not provide funding to any venue or organization that makes sexual material available to people under 18.

On homelessness, which has more of a presence in the 1st District than anywhere in the county, Hirst said he would like to take a leadership role. “That's a complex one, because it's made up of so many different elements,” he said. “You've got people aging out of foster care, you have drug addiction. Some of that element’s from out of town, some of it’s native. Of course mental health is an issue. And there’s strain on housing here.”

Hirst is one of five Republicans endorsed this cycle by a group calling itself Knox County Conservative Republicans, an outgrowth of the Knox For Liberty group created by local conservative political consultant Erik Wiatr (whose other clients have included Commissioner Lee).

Hirst’s handful of donors include law director candidate and former county GOP Chair Daniel Herrera, who is also endorsed by Wiatr’s group.

As for Hirst’s most obvious political handicap — he is a white Republican in a district that has long elected Black Democrats — he said he thinks long-established political allegiances are beginning to fray.

“We've seen in other places in the country a real rejection of the Democratic Party, especially in places like New York and Chicago, by minorities,” he said. “Where we're seeing illegal immigration strain resources that are normally allocated to minorities there. They’re really pushing back against it.”