Sideshow: Motown bids farewell to Esther Gordy Edwards

A cadre of musicians, including Smokey Robinson, Claudette Robinson of the Miracles, Martha Reeves and Rosalind Ashford of the Vandellas, and the Four Tops' Duke Fakir gathered at Detroit's Bethel AME Church on Wednesday to bid farewell to Motown Historical Museum founder Esther Gordy Edwards, who died last week at 91. Stevie Wonder, 61, sang a medley of "Sweetest Someone I Know" and "Isn't She Lovely," and a rendition of the hymn "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," says the Detroit Free Press. "If we all had a [family member] who cheered our own family as much as she cheered hers, we'd have world unity," Wonder said. Edwards' brother, Berry Gordy Jr., said his sis was a tough cookie.

"The women were the bosses, and they were serious," he said. "The men in my family were clowns." The funeral program included copies of proclamations from Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and other local politicos. Gordy said the service was "the most beautiful I've ever seen."Thou shalt not paraphrase

The recently unveiled Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington is drawing protests from an unlikely source - King's fellow civil rights icon, poet Maya Angelou.

Angelou takes issue with the inscription on the statue, which reads, "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness," saying the quote makes King look like an "arrogant twit."

The inscription is paraphrased from a famous sermon King delivered at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church two months before he was murdered. The problem, Angelou says, is that the inscription is missing an all-important qualifying "if."

King, who was speaking about ways one could eulogize him, actually said, "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, say that I was a drum major for peace."

Angelou tells the Washington Post that the inaccurate quote "minimizes the man. . . . It makes him seem less than the humanitarian he was."

T.I. halfway to home