Edwards was a Motown executive for nearly three decades, holding numerous leadership positions within the music company whose artists included Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations and The Four Tops. (Getty Photo)

Women's Pioneer and Motown Museum founder Esther Gordy Edwards, has died at age 91


DETROIT (Tell Us Det) - The Motown Museum made the announcement Thursday. The museum, which Edwards founded, says she died Wednesday night in Detroit surrounded by family and friends.

Edwards was a Motown executive for nearly three decades, holding numerous leadership positions within the music company whose artists included Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations and The Four Tops. Motown Records, which Berry Gordy started with a family loan in 1959, churned out scores of global hits from the building it dubbed "Hitsville, U.S.A." in Detroit. The company moved to Los Angeles in 1972.

She served as senior vice president, corporate secretary and director of Motown International Operations, where she was charged with exposing the famed "Motown sound" to international audiences.

"I always thought I was the visionary in the family but I missed the biggest thing of all when Esther turned the so-called trash left behind after I sold the company in 1988 into a phenomenal world-class monument at the spot where Hitsville started - the Motown museum," Berry Gordy said in a statement Thursday.

She made other history as well: She was the first woman elected as a board member of the Detroit Bank of the Commonwealth in the mid-1970’s, becoming one of the very few women in the U.S. on any bank boards at the time. She was the first woman elected to the board of the Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce in 1973. She chaired the board of the development company that built Trappers Alley in the Greektown section of Detroit. She was a trustee at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a member of the historic Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and also served as a board member of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change.

Stevie Wonder said, "She believed in me - when I was 14 years old and many other people didn't or could only see what they could at the time, she championed me being in Motown." Wonder went on to say, "I shared with her many of my songs first before anyone else."

It was her most cherished dream to transform Motown's West Grand Boulevard location into a museum, to welcome the many fans who traveled there from all corners of the world. She finally achieved that dream in the late 1980s.

"She was definitely a pioneer," said Audley Smith, CEO of the Motown Historical Museum.

She has received many civic contribution, membership and community service awards (including the prestigious Distinguished Warriors Award from the Detroit Urban League). As the modern day historian of her biological and corporate family legacy, Ms. Gordy-Edwards has spent decades moving up – quickly and decisively. In moving up, she still made time for her husband, the late Michigan State Representative, George H. Edwards and her son, Robert Berry Bullock.

Funeral arrangements are to be announced.