To say that Knox County’s 1st District is its most Democratic-leaning district is both an understatement and a low bar to clear.

The district has been represented by African-American leaders for decades.

After all, of County Commission’s nine geographic districts, only two are currently represented by Democrats: the 1st, which stretches from East Knoxville through downtown to Mechanicsville and Lonsdale, and the 2nd, which covers most of North Knoxville.

But the scale of the challenge for a Republican candidate in the district is dramatic. There hasn’t even been a Republican name on the ballot for the district’s Commission seat since 2016, when GOP candidate Michael Covington took just 29 percent of the vote.

This year’s Commission contest does feature a two-party race, between Democrat Damon Rawls and Republican Charles Frazier. But Frazier’s Republican credentials are tenuous — he ran as a Democrat for school board just two years ago. And Rawls appears the stronger candidate on available metrics, including endorsements and fundraising.

As of the most recent financial disclosures, through the end of March, Rawls had raised a total of $13,585 for his campaign and had $2,558 on hand. His donors have included Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon, former Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero, attorney Ursula Bailey and entrepreneur Brandon Bruce. He has been endorsed by incumbent 1st District County Commissioner Dasha Lundy, and just yesterday by East Tennessee Realtors.

Frazier, in contrast, has reported raising $1,432 — almost all of it in loans from himself — and had just $30 on hand at the end of March.

The 1st District is the county’s only majority-minority district, at least as of the most recent redistricting based on the 2020 Census. At that time, the district was 49.8 percent white and 50.2 percent nonwhite (a combination of Black, mixed-race and non-white Hispanic residents), although given growth in downtown’s population since then that may not be true anymore.

Regardless, both Rawls and Frazier are African-American, which means the seat will continue to be held by a Black representative as it has for the last several decades.

The district is also rife with both needs and opportunities. While downtown and its immediate surrounding areas have seen massive investment in the past few decades — including the new publicly funded stadium under construction just east of the Old City — many of its precincts rank among the poorest in the county.

Residents have expressed a desire for more public and private investment, but also concerns about keeping neighborhoods affordable for the people who currently live there.

Both candidates faced primary challenges in March. Rawls defeated former County Commissioner Evelyn Gill by a 53-47 percent margin in the Democratic primary, and Frazier beat Justin Hirst by just seven votes in the GOP contest.

The following profiles have been updated and edited from our primary election coverage.

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.”

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 and the donors listed above, Rawls’ more high-profile supporters include former county Election Administrator Greg Mackay and the city’s community safety and empowerment officer LaKenya Middlebrook.

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.”