- Hi, I'm Christy McDonald and here's what's coming up this week on One Detroit.

What we learned this year and what to look for in '22 with Nolan Finley and Stephen Henderson.

Plus the latest challenges in the redistricting process with Sergio Martinez-Beltran.

And then the nostalgia of the holidays at Hudson's.

It's a festive flashback.

It's all coming up this week on One Detroit.

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(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Christy McDonald, and welcome to One Detroit.

So glad that you're with me this week.

The end of the year always brings reflection of what we've learned and then the hope and anticipation of what's to come in 2022.

Well, our one Detroit contributors, Nolan Finley, and Stephen Henderson got together to talk about the most impactful stories in 2021 and where we're headed next year.

Plus, Michigan's redistricting commission with big decisions at the end of December, that could spark many legal challenges.

Sergio Martinez-Beltran fills us in.

And then we will end the show with a little holiday nostalgia.

You may remember the decorations, Santa and the magic of shopping Hudson's over the holidays.

The Detroit Historical Museum felt this year was the perfect time to celebrate the spectacle of Hudson's during the holidays with a new exhibit.

We'll have it for you.

We're starting off with the year that was, and then where we'd like to be.

Our One Detroit contributors, Nolan Finley, the editorial page editor of the Detroit News and Stephen Henderson, host of American Black Journal, got together to talk about the biggest stories of 2021 and what we can expect in '22.

- We're sitting here at the end of 2021 not much better off than we were at the end of 2020.

- Yeah, well, a little better in terms of like prospects, I guess, but I mean, we start the year six days into the year with a rabble of insurrectionists trying to overturn the election and destabilize the democracy and it kinda went downhill from there, I guess.

- Breaking it down.

Let's talk about Washington for a minute.

I think this promise we had from President Joe Biden, that he would get control of the virus, that he would revive the economy, that he would raise our stature on the world stage and put us together so that we'd stop fighting.

Not much of that has happened or at least not happened the way he promised it would.

I think it's been very disappointing year for the president and his number's showing.

- Yeah, well, I mean, again, first year for a president coming in after an incredible run of chaos, everything was left pretty destabilized.

I think he's done all right.

I think in terms of getting control of the virus, we were already starting to see the vaccines take hold when he took office.

If you leave Michigan and go elsewhere things are in much better shape than they are here and we have our own problem that I still can't figure out what we are doing wrong in particular, but things are much better in terms of the number of people nationwide have gotten vaccinated.

The economy is back.

It's not as much back as maybe we would want it to, but that's because we have some inherent problems that we couldn't have anticipated.

The disappearance of the labor force is a huge destabilizing influence in the economy.

That's gonna go on for a long time.

I think the president has done what he could with that stuff.

I was not expecting that he would be able to bring us together.

Half the country didn't vote for him and thinks he stole the election.

So good luck getting people to work together under those circumstances.

- We've got something here that we never dreamed we'd have a year ago and that's inflation.

And the administration seems to have at first had no grasp of how serious inflation was and how real that was for the American people, and now have no answers for it.

It was a complete bungle in Afghanistan.

So I think next year we're looking ahead with all of this going into an election year and we know what happens in an election year.

Everything grinds to a halt except for the fighting.

And we've got some very real problems that need to be solved.

- I think the election will be really hotly contested, but I also think we have this existential threat now.

You have a party that has a large number of people now who are concentrating on gaining power in places where they can decertify votes or decide that elections don't matter and that's gonna challenge us not just next year, but in two more years when the presidential election swings back around.

But let's talk about locally what went on this year to kind of remind us of challenges.

That wild summer we have just sticks in my mind.

And of course we had this December wind storm as well, unusual in its intensity and its consequences reminding us again that we have not invested in our infrastructure in the way that we should have, and that we aren't planning to in many ways.

I mean, there are some things on tap.

We're replacing all the lead lines in the state, that's a start, but we have major major problems beneath the ground, above the ground that we aren't even acknowledging at this point.

- We've got a huge pool of money we're sitting on for infrastructure, billions of dollars, no real plans to spend it or how to spend it, no seeming will to spend it.

We know what's going on in Benton Harbor, another big story of 2021, we got to get those lead pipes out of the ground, but we also have to secure our electrical grid.

We can't have these major power outages like we had last summer.

We've got to do something to move water out of these freeways and out of people's basements.

We also have COVID relief money and there's no reason hospitals are waiting for these monoclonal antibody treatments that many places say we just can't afford, or we don't have the staffing to administer.

That's what that money was for.

Why is it it's sitting in a huge bucket in Lansing still?

They've got to come together and figure out how to invest that money and also how to invest that money to make sure our schools are safe.

We now have Oakland County students saying, thousands of them, we don't wanna go back to school.

We don't feel it's safe.

Got to use part of that money to secure those schools.

- Well, you gotta talk to your friends in the Republican party about both those issues.

They don't wanna spend the money.

- The governor hasn't exactly been a leader on this either.

- He has a plan to spend all of the money and they don't like her plan so they're not spending in.

- I'm not sure her plan addresses these issues fully that we just talked about.

But we're sitting on the biggest windfall, biggest amount of cash we've ever had and we have no clue how to work together to spend it.

That's got to change in '22, but the prospect of it doing so in a year when she's going to be running for reelection and the legislature is gonna be running for reelection I don't think there's much hope.

No hope, Steve.

(chuckles) - Happy new year.

(chuckles) Well, to throw everything even more into political limbo the new maps that this redistricting commission has been working on are really gonna spin people's heads.

They should, because that was the point.

But I'm not sure that everybody will be content with what we have.

That will cause another big fight early in the year to determine whether those maps hold.

Everyone it seems like will wanna go to court to try to overturn them.

I do still believe that this is incredible progress that we've been able to see this process up front.

We've been able to hear what they're doing and why, we can criticize the maps, they change them.

It's way better than it was, but there are a lot of people who are really nervous, I think, about that outcome.

- Well, I wish we could see all of it and there delve into closed meetings and lack of transparency.

Inexcusable for a group that needs people to trust its work.

I think these maps are headed right to court.

It's gonna be a difficult election year while we wait for the courts to decide what the real districts are.

People are gonna get late start campaigning.

It's gonna be a mess on a lot of fronts and you and I will be here talking about it, Steve, and doing so civilly, right?

- (chuckles) That's right.

- Merry Christmas and happy new year.

- Yeah, to you too.

- The end of December is a crucial deadline for Michigan's redistricting commission.

The group is expected to adopt new legislative and congressional districts.

And this comes after months of meetings, maps and public input.

What else is expected?

Lawsuits over the maps.

And the commission is already facing litigation from media organizations for not releasing notes from a closed meeting this fall.

Will Glover caught up with Bridge reporter's, Sergio Martinez-Beltran for more on what happens next.

- Just give us a quick overview of what the redistricting process is and how important it is to the State of Michigan.

- Every 10 years, the US Census Bureau releases the population counts of states.

And so the states use those numbers to do apportionment.

So to create new political boundaries.

And that means that those are the districts where you live and they decide who are you gonna vote for in terms of state senate, state house also who could be your congressional member depending on where you live.

And when you give power to people who might benefit from it, this tends to be problematic, right?

And we saw that.

The legislature drew lines in private, in secret behind closed doors.

I mean, also drew districts that were deemed some of the most gerrymandered in the country.

In 2018, the Michigan voters overwhelmingly supported a constitutional amendment that drastically changed how we drew districts in the state.

So that constitutional amendment created the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission.

That's a group made up of 13 everyday people, four Republicans, four Democrats, and five independents who have never drawn districts before.

They have never had to work with maps in the past, but they volunteered themselves, they were elected or selected, I should say.

And they are the ones drawing the lines this year.

- I know that there's a 45 day window where the public gets to make comments.

They've released some of their drafts for the maps.

Is that where we are?

- That's right, yeah.

So for the last few months, the redistricting commission has been working on proposed maps.

And so a few weeks ago they put forward 15 proposed maps for people to see and provide feedback on them.

We are in that 45 day public comment period.

We're in the middle of it.

- Lately, we've seen that there have been a few media outlets that have filed suit against the commission for keeping certain memorandum secrets.

Can you just tell us a little bit about what's going on there?

- Yeah, so I think the biggest issue that the commission is facing is how it has handled minority, majority districts in the state.

In the past Michigan has had 17 state legislative minority, majority districts, most of them in the area of Detroit, but also some in Flint.

The way the redistricting commission has drawn the districts this time around truly reduces significantly the number of minority, majority districts to a handful, And so black leaders, black voters in Southeast Michigan, in Flint, Michigan as well, they have come out and said that the way the commissioner drew these districts will further disenfranchise them.

We're talking now in terms of lawsuits.

And this is where the press comes in.

The commission has been significantly more transparent than the previous process at the legislature, but just because they've been more transparent, doesn't mean we're not gonna hold them accountable.

And what we know he's done on October 27th in East Lansing, the commission met behind closed doors, they shut out the public, they shut out the press and they discussed two private memos, two memos.

One of them that had to do with the Voting Rights Act, which is the federal law that that allows for the creations of minority and majority districts, and also another memo that was about the history of discrimination in the state and its impacts on voting.

- We have since had a letter signed by all of our council, setting forth reasons that we should not release the memo, which is really a historical document and/or the tape of the conversation.

There was quite a bit historical comment in the paper, that showed how Michigan had dealt with historically discriminatory voting in the past from the civil war forward.

- If the commission decides to waive attorney-client privilege, our ability to give you counsel in incoming litigation will be hampered.

And that is an understatement.

- So I guess the question lies in whether or not it's important for the lawyers that the committee has on retainer to be able to give them the correct and candid information versus abiding by what the whole purpose of the commission is, which is to be transparent in everything, all of the materials that it uses to draw these lines, correct?

- Yes, that's the big question.

And I think that when the commission was discussing this memos behind closed doors, the reality is that there was no pending litigation against the commission at that moment.

So this idea of discussing legal strategy when there's no pending litigation against the commission, has raised some concerns and some attorneys have said that that's weird, that that's not what usually happens.

We also know that the commission spokesman, but also the commissioners keep saying that they are the most transparent body in the state.

But then when you push them on this particular issue, they quickly get a little bit upset because they say that they have the right to keep these documents private or secret because they follow the attorney-client privilege.

And so this is why it matters.

It is because voters in Michigan, 61% of the voters in Michigan in 2018 voted to create a commission and a process that was A, more fair in terms of party censorship, but also more transparent.

And I think the commission has faced all these questions all this time.

But I think it's important because at the end of the day, we're talking about people of color and they're feeling that the way the commission has treated districts further disenfranchises them, especially black voters in Detroit.

And what we're talking about here is that the commission keeps saying, we're not hurting you, but they're using some documents that we don't know.

And maybe if they make those documents public, we would know what was the rationale for them to reducing the minority, majority districts and the reason for the way they treated the political boundaries.

- If you grew up around here, that's me, you remember shopping Hudson's at the holidays.

Maybe you shopped downtown at Christmas, you saw Santa, maybe you had some Santa bears.

My mom is still hanging onto a Santa bear mug from 1986.

Well, this year the Detroit Historical Museum is celebrating that Detroit tradition with an exhibit called Hudson's holidays.

Take a look.

(whimsical music) - When I think of the holidays, I think of Hudson's.

Growing up in Detroit, and one of my first memories of the holidays was getting all dressed up and going downtown to Hudson's to visit Santa.

- I became enthralled with the store and the traditions the first time my folks brought me downtown to the store.

I'd never seen a store that big, and I just went nuts.

- [Delisha] Nobody did it quite like Hudson's did it.

From the big tree to all the beautiful things to buy.

I mean, it really was a place of wonder.

- [Michael] The show began on the sidewalk.

The minute you came inside, you were literally thrown into a different world with beautiful architecture and lighting and drapes and things like that.

You forgot all your troubles.

- We're sitting here today in the main area of our Hudson's holiday exhibit in the Detroit Historical Museum.

The holidays are a time when you wanna share stories with your family, you want your kids to experience the things that you experienced when you were a kid.

And one of the things that we hear about here at the Detroit historical society most often is Hudson's.

- The company meant so much to so many people in this marketplace.

That store, during the holidays employed 10,000 people, a hundred thousand people a day would visit that building to not only shop but dine.

The company through the years created so many of our iconic events.

The Thanksgiving day parade was begun by the company in 1924.

- Hudson's was a huge department store and it had restaurants, it had Santa, and it was kind of the special place that you went, particularly at the holiday season.

Here at the museum, we wanted people to have the idea and the feeling of what that might have been like years ago when our grand department store, Hudson's was in its heyday.

- [Michael] What we did is we edited down a lot of things.

What would be the most relevant for the greater public?

- There's a surprise and a delight to take you back to that Hudson's holiday experience.

And I love that about how we've set it up here.

It's not just one place, but it really is a vibe, if you will.

- This exhibition was designed in much the same way that a department store was, is exactly what our exhibits team was thinking about when they put this thing together.

We've created 11 pop-ups all through the museum space.

When I was first touring this as it was kind of being put up, I realized as you walked down the stairs, right at the bottom of the stairs is some signage and advertising from Hudson's back in their basement shops, which were kind of their bargain, that's where you got the term bargain basement, right?

One of the things that I love is that we actually created a little mini pop-up exhibit inside of the elevator.

And so it's really fun that we've been able to recreate that experience of going from floor to floor and experiencing this big department store by putting those departments in different places all throughout the museum.

- The Santa bears are my favorite part of this exhibition.

I think the first Santa bear came out in 1985.

I remember that one.

I definitely remember the 1986 bear because he had the little 1986 on the sweater.

But we always got Santa bears for Christmas.

Every year the Santa bears were part of our Christmas tradition.

- My favorite part of the museum, I kind of really love holiday sparkle so I do love all of the Christmas lights and the sparkly stuff here in Toyland which is where we're sitting.

I also really love the fashion.

Our fashion collection here at the society is amazing.

- [Michael] In terms of what the public will be interested in, certainly Santa bears has created a huge interest just from the social media thus far.

The delivery wagon, that was created for the 75th anniversary of the company.

Shopping bags that we hadn't previously displayed through the years.

Photographs that we blew up, things that were donated from the public.

The red carpet that you see here as you come into the Toyland area.

- It's interesting when you think about kids now having the experience of shopping purely online.

They don't even get the big Christmas catalog, much less the experience of going to a really beautiful department store or even a mall.

And so bringing an exhibit back like this one, where it is all decorated and everything is sparkly and beautiful, and you get to remember that and feel really special for a minute gives the kids the opportunity to experience something that they're not experiencing in real life anymore.

This museum is a place where we want families to come together and come and visit us during the holidays.

We brought this really nostalgic exhibition to the public for that reason.

- It's about life and family and the opportunity to be together, which, these days is certainly not something to be taken for granted.

So I really do think that it really is an inclusive exhibition that people can come and just really remember a simpler time and be amazed by these toys.

- [Rebecca] I think whenever you have the experience of being put back into a specific time, you have this moment where you get to imagine what it was to be there at that time, what those people's lives were like.

- [Delisha] I really hope that people come and enjoy it and feel really good when they're here.

- [Michael] I hope they take away feeling of joy.

- This exhibit is going to remind you once again, what it means to share memories with your family.

It's kind of the perfect entry to that holiday season for everybody.

(whimsical music) - For more on the exhibit, just head to our website onedetroitpbs.org.

That is gonna do it for us this week.

Have a wonderful holiday gathering safely and spending time with your family and friends.

And I wanna say a special thank you to the entire One Detroit crew for all of their hard work in 2021.

And thank you at home for supporting us and supporting local journalism every step of the way.

We are grateful to be able to tell the stories of our community and we thank you for your trust in us.

We are going to leave you tonight with some scenes from the nutcracker ballet performed at the Interlochen Center for the Arts up north.

The entire production will air right here on Detroit Public Television on December 20th.

Have a great week and I'll see you next time.

(whimsical music) - [Fast Spoken Female Narrator] You can find more at onedetroitpbs.org or subscribe to our social media channels and sign up for our One Detroit newsletter.