People named in Hughes's Ask Your Mama (incomplete list):
"Cultural Exchange": Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, George Schuyler, Hughes himself, Ralph Ellison, Shalom (or Sholom) Aleichem, James Baldwin, Leontyne Price, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, Sekou Touré, Jomo Kenyatta, Martin Luther King, Rufus Clement, Governor Orville Faubus, Senator James O. Eastland
"Ride, Red, Ride": Castro, Adam Clayton Powell
"Shades of Pigment": Eastland, D. F. Malan, Lotte Lenya
"Ode to Dinah": Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, (allusion to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo")
"Horn of Plenty": Katherine Dunham, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Eric Dolph, Billy Strayhorn, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Richard Wright, Joe Glasser, Goerge Sokolsky
"Gospel Cha-Cha": Erzulie and other Haitian voodoo gods and goddesses, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Marie Laveau, John Jasper
"Is It True": Alan Lomax
"Ask Your Mama": Patrica Lumumba, Louis Armstrong, Nat "King" Cole, Touré, Emmett Till
"Bird In Orbit": Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Richard Nixon, Charlie Parker, Aimé Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor...
The Naropa Institute's group bloggers set out to annotate the whole of Ask Your Mama.
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