Angelou said that Barack Obamas half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was named after her.
http://www.glamour.com/inspired/blogs/the-conversation/2013/01/maya-soetoro-ng-president-obam.html
If that were to be true, the only time Stanley Ann Dunham would have met Maya Angelou was when Maya spent six months in Hawaii in 1964-1965 when she stayed with her brother, Bailey Johnson jr.
Maya Angelou was in Cairo from at least 1960, working for an arab publisher with David, the son of Shirley Graham Du Bois, who was visited by Malcom X in Cairo, after which she went to Ghana, where Malcolm X also visited her and Shirley... before Maya returned to the US just before Malcolm was killed.
What on earth would have persuaded Stanley Ann Dunham to name her daughter, born in late 1970, after a woman whom she had met (singing in nightclubs)in Hawaii five years earlier?
“What on earth would have persuaded Stanley Ann Dunham to name her daughter, born in late 1970, after a woman whom she had met (singing in nightclubs)in Hawaii five years earlier?”
Angelou’s book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was published in 1970. It was on the New York Times best seller list starting in May, 1970 (Maya Soetoro was born in August, 1970).
Maya Angelou was a single teenage mother in the 1940s and was in an interracial marriage in the 1950s. So maybe SAD saw some parallels.