Motown Museum Chair and CEO Robin Terry and Ethan Davidson, a folk musician and director for the William Davidson Foundation, were immersed in careers in other places and initially declined the leadership roles they now hold in the city.
But the pull of family brought both metro Detroit natives back to their roots. And today, both are building on the visions of their elder family members.
Terry and Davidson took the stage Wednesday evening at The Icon, (formerly the UAW-GM training center) on the Detroit Riverfront to share what brought them home during a conversation moderated by retired Fox-2 anchor Huel Perkins as part of Detroit Homecoming IX.
The annual event produced by Crain’s Detroit Business in partnership with the Downtown Detroit Partnership, invites the city’s “expats” who once lived in the area but have found success in other places back to reengage with the city and consider making investments here.
Terry initially wanted to be a television anchor.
“My grandmother, Esther Gordy Edwards, always wanted me to be involved with the museum, and it just wasn’t the thing I was passionate about,” Terry said.
She wasn’t completely absent from the museum: shehad been involved with it since her grandmother founded it in 1985, guiding visitors through its two historic houses on West Grand Boulevard during breaks from high school and college for seven years. And after graduating from Eastern Michigan University with a degree in telecommunications and film, she joined the museum staff full-time as its director of public relations.
But she left “the family business,” as she called it, in 1995 to join first D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles Inc. in Troy and after taking a year off to have her son, San Diego-based Gable Group in a Detroit-based role.
She spent the next few years as director of public relations at the College for Creative Studies and development officer for Focus: Hope before returning to Motown Museum to serve as deputy director in 2002 and taking on the board chair role after her grandmother had heart surgery.
She became executive director of the museum in 2004 after spending 18 months working with Edwards to oversee museum operations and staff.
“It was divinely guided. There’s no other way to say it,” Terry said Wednesday. “My grandmother had heart surgeries and wasn’t able to return to the business.”
There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her grandmother, who’d raised her since the age of 15, she said. But it was during a conversation the two had on the way home from the hospital one day that everything clicked.
“I grew to understand the power that Motown has, as a brand, as a story, as a beacon, as an example, as a symbol of excellence of what it can do to empower other people. And once I made that connection, similarly, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s my life,'” she said.
Today, Terry is leading the campus in a $55 million expansion plan that will add interactive exhibits, The Ford Motor Company Theater, recording studios, meeting spaces, a cafe and expanded retail and new programming space to the museum.
Davidson, son of the late billionaire William “Bill” Davidson, former owner of the Detroit Pistons, Detroit Shock, Tampa Bay Lightning and Guardian Industries, was a singer, musician and songwriter who toured the country and lived in Alaska for a time. He had also worked with the Detroit Pistons on and off.
His last tour ran for six straight years.
“My father knew that I was going to take some time off and said ‘Well, I want you to come back to Detroit and work for me,'” Davidson said.
But the younger Davidson resisted.
His dad told him it was different this time. He was thinking about what came next and wanted to start a foundation that would invest in Detroit, his home and the place he’d launched his business.
“I said, ‘I’ll be right there,'” Ethan Davidson said.
Today, he chairs the Detroit Opera board and serves on the boards of organizations including the Detroit institute of Arts and Motown Museum. And he leads the grants committee for the William Davidson Foundation.
During the panel, Perkins asked Terry and Davidson about their relatives’ legacies.
Women figured prominently in what each family built, the pair said.
A lot of the talent that first came to Motown, including Marvin Gaye, came from an earlier record label established by her aunt and then folded to help support Motown, Terry said.
When her little brother Berry Gordy wanted to get into the record business and start an independent label, Edwards knew he wouldn’t succeed on his own, Terry said. So Edwards said she’d run the business for two years so he could focus on the talent, and the rest is history.
“If it weren’t for the women in my great-uncle’s life, there would be no Motown,” Terry said.
Edwards also had the foresight to preserve the “Hitsville USA” house when her brother and the label moved to California, her granddaughter said.
“She somehow knew the story of the house and the people who’d been there would inspire people in the future.”
Women also played a key role in his family businesses, operating them after men in the family died, Davidson said. And his father’s aunt was among the first female attorneys probably in the state of Michigan 100 years ago when women just didn’t get law degrees.
Davidson said his grandmother, who ended up running a lot of family-owned theaters, sold the Linwood Theatre in Detroit to the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s father, for his church.
Going back, “it was the women that were doing business and…managing businesses,” Davidson said.
From left, moderator Huel Perkins, retired FOX2 anchor, Robin Terry, CEO and chairwoman, Motown Museum and Ethan Davidson, musician and philanthropist, William Davidson Foundation, converse during the program “Family Albums” during the 2022 Detroit Homecoming IX at The Icon in Detroit on Sept. 14, 2022.