“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.
That's assuming there were any. It's possible they knew each other. Both were in Honolulu in 1965.