Did Stanley Ann Dunham Obama? Soetoro name her daughter after Maya Angelou? Perhaps those paths did, indeed, cross in Africa in 1961.
It was written as the result of this short observation made by another Freeper, who wrote:
... Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case. Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois...
to which I replied:
There we go again, it all starts with DuBois, mentor to Paul Robeson who was instrumental in Frank Marshall Davis going to Hawaii; finds its way to Ghana where DuBois was visited by Paul Robeson and Malcolm X, and living in that expat African-American community was Maya Angelou, good friend of James Baldwin who tried to write a screenplay of the life of Malcolm X...William Ayres with his door plastered with Malcolm X images, writes 'Dreams' for Obama, whose 'father' was employed by Mboya, the Luo, educated in England, who In 1958 attended a convention of African nationalists at Accra, Ghana...came to the US in 1959, the same year that Oginga Odinga also came to the US and was embraced by Malcolm X - the same year btw, that Obama Senior landed in Hawaii. Oginga Odinga, father of Raila Odinga for whom Obama campaigned...
Is that enough to start one thinking that maybe Malcolm X knew Obama Snr before the 'student from Kenya' showed up in Hawaii, or maybe there's a reason Stanley Ann Dunham named her daughter Maya?
----sorta-tongue-in-cheek.
As for Langston Hughes, I haven't researched that connection. Yet. And I left out Harry Belafonte!
Never thought of that. They were definitely players in a significant group of Socialists/Communists with many interesting connections... I’ll have to find the book I read now. As I said, there were a lot of names and dates.
Fred, the biography you linked to for Maya Angelou has some things out of order when compared with Angelou’s accounts in her book (I think the one I have is “A Woman’s Heart”) and it starts with her son and her living in California, and then moving to Harlem, and includes the time period when she was living in Cairo, and Ghana. She joined the Writer’s Group, and was very active in the “Civil Rights Movement” as well as being a very strong supporter of the Cuban Revolution. It also mentions her meeting Farrakhan, and interestingly — at least up until the point I stopped reading she did not mention Malcolm X. This all started (the Writing Group/Cuba/Farrakhan) BEFORE she met Make and married him, IIRC. It’s been a while since I read the book though so, I could be wrong...
[Now, you’ve given me a reason to find the dang book and force myself through the rest of it though! LOL — I’ll post any pertinent info. and dates and such. As I said, some of that bio seems “out of order”.]