Richard Briggs isn’t a mean-spirited guy, and he lives way out in west Knox County far from the heart of the city, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he didn’t know that not a single African American served on Knoxville City Council from 1912-1969. That was the year that municipal elections changed, and the District 6 council seat was created “So that a Black would stand a chance of winning,” said historian Bob Booker.
From the day Dr. Henry Morgan Green left office in 1912 until the day Booker’s old friend Theotis Robinson was sworn in and took a seat on the dais next to Cas Walker, Black citizens were excluded from city government.
Vice Mayor Andrew Roberto alerted locals to pending state legislation that would eliminate citywide voting in elections for city council.
Robinson was shocked when he heard about it:
“That’s Bulls**,” he said. “Historically, everybody ran at-large back when Cas (Walker) was in his heyday. What would happen was Black candidates would run and make it through the primary but then in the free-for-all, with no district seats, they would lose in the general elections. Case law was beginning to develop documenting the obstacles Black candidates were facing. In 1968, we added an amendment to the city charter that would expand city council from seven to nine people elected from six districts with three at-large – patterned after San Diego – with citywide runoffs.”
So, until I learn otherwise, I’m going to assume that Briggs didn’t know this history when he agreed to carry a bill that would do away with Knoxville’s district-only primaries with the top two vote-getters proceeding to a citywide general election. He has indicated that he won’t move the bill forward unless he satisfies himself that the city’s present way of conducting elections is unconstitutional.
I’m going take another educated guess and say that the senator doesn’t have the same zeal for this bill as does House sponsor Elaine Davis, a first termer who is part of the hard-right faction of the Knox County GOP that has been trying to defeat city voters’ demonstrated preference for Democrats.
Davis is a frequent candidate who finally won an election with an assist from a bright red, mostly-county district designed to elect a Republican. She is closely aligned with right wing operative Erik Wiatr, who has made a living off (unsuccessfully) attempting to mess with city politics.
It was Wiatr who masterminded the 2021 GOP attempt to take over city council. He collected lots of money and went 0-fer. Whiffed. Nada. Zilch.
Plainly put, this bill is another little piece of a statewide Stick-It-To-Cities agenda that has already given Nashville a George Santos-lite Republican Congress Critter who claims to be an economist and an international crime buster and is neither.
And, again putting it plainly, the city, back then, was fighting off threats of federal intervention regarding its highly segregated school system and was seeking to immunize itself against costly civil rights lawsuits. And it succeeded. The result was a system that is responsive to all city voters. It’s not perfect, but it forces Knoxville City Council members to recognize every Knoxvillian as a constituent, unlike Knox County Commission.
I make this claim based on my experience of covering the commission back in the days when it was a 19-member body – two from Districts 1-4 and 6-9 and three from District 5 (drawn intentionally with a higher population). Commissioners were elected by district vote and were only as accountable to other citizens as their consciences compelled them to be. Not that there weren’t honorable commissioners who cared for the whole county, but let’s face it: most of them didn’t give a crap what anybody who couldn’t vote for them thought unless they were deep-pocketed developers.
The clearest example of this in my memory involved residents on the far west end of Westland Drive, a lovely country road that skimmed through the woods and fields and well-kept homes at the edge of Ft. Loudoun Lake. The last thing the people who lived there wanted was Pellissippi Parkway running through it.
They couldn’t stop the state from extending Pellissippi Parkway, so they focused on the proposed exit ramp that would dump traffic onto their green and leafy street. The counties could say where to put the parkway exits, so the neighborhoods prepared to fight it out at county commission, using the same methods that city residents use when they go before city council:
They organized. They got a lawyer. They marshalled facts and figures. They turned out big crowds. And they lost, despite the fact that their district had three representatives to everybody else’s two. Their most vocal opponent was then-Commissioner Mary Lou Horner, who lived on the other end of the county.
After the meeting, some of the neighborhood people wanted to know what they could have done differently. I told them they did everything right, but they never had a chance at wooing Horner (and others) away from the developers. Then they started talking about voting her out of office.
I had to tell them they couldn’t do that, either, unless they wanted to move to Halls or Fountain City, since commissioners were (and mostly still are) elected by the district-only. This system encouraged rampant vote-swapping and deal-making:
“I have to vote against this, but I won’t get mad at you if you vote for it.”
This turns public bodies into favor machines that inevitably favor that other GOP: the Golden Rule of Politics:
“He who has the gold makes the rules.”
The county’s reforms after the notorious Black Wednesday debacle in 2008 reduced the number of commissioners from 19 to 11, two of whom serve at-large, were meant to clean up the way the county legislative body does business and to make it more responsible to the people. But there’s only so much leverage that the people can exercise without the carrot/stick of the vote.
City council has nine members, six nominated from districts and three at-large. Currently, the top two vote-getters from each district’s primary advance to the general election which is voted on citywide.
Former council member Carlene Malone makes the case for the city’s election system as well as anybody:
“The beauty of the council is every member is accountable to every citizen of the city. There’s no vote trading going on. It’s not, ‘You give me this, I’ll give you that.’ That’s the deal you don’t have to make.”
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.