Diana Oughton

Diana Oughton (January 26, 1942 – March 6, 1970) was an American member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Michigan Chapter and later, a member of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground.

Oughton received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College.

After graduation, Oughton went to Guatemala with the American Friends Service Committee program to teach the young and older Native Americans.

After returning to the U.S, she worked at the Children's Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan while getting her master's degree at the University of Michigan.

She became active in SDS, eventually becoming a full-time organizer and member of the Jesse James Gang.

Oughton graduated from high school in 1959, entering Bryn Mawr College as a German-language major.

Oughton supported her Republican family's political values by opposing federal banking regulations, social security, and anything associated with big government.

When she was 19, Oughton went to West Germany under a program sponsored by Wayne State University to spend her junior year of college at the University of Munich.

She rented a room from Gerhard Weber, the former rector of the university.

Oughton became friends with some of the German students, including Peter, with whom she had conversations late into the night.

In the family-authorized biography Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, author Thomas Powers noted Diana's recollection of a conversation with Peter that resonated with her: "He said...Hurrah for Socialism!"

After her study abroad, Oughton returned to Bryn Mawr for her senior year.

During this time, Oughton and many other students read and were influenced by the book Black Like Me.

The author John Howard Griffin gave an account of what he encountered going to the Southern United States, disguised as an African American.

The book had a profound effect on Oughton, prompting her to volunteer in 1962 to tutor African-American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia.

Oughton once told her Sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who could not read.

After receiving her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1963, Oughton spent the next two years in Guatemala with the American Friends Service Committee program (AFSC).

Nearly half the women from Oughton's college senior class had gone on to graduate school.

Oughton was assigned to Chichicastenango, at that time an isolated indigenous market town.

Oughton went to Guatemala as a liberal, believing that the problems could be identified and solutions devised and carried out.

Eventually, she became a radical and began to feel an urgency to change everything at once.

While there, Oughton worked with young adults and older indigenous people to teach them to read.

She helped local Catholic priests implement nutritional programs and edited a left-wing Guatemalan newspaper.

Oughton lived in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse.

During this time, the questions with which she had struggled with came to a head.

Oughton questioned what to do about poverty, social injustice, and revolution in the world.

Oughton came to the conclusion that no matter how many hours were spent working to feed and educate, there would always be more people than jobs to earn wages, inadequate food supplies, and never enough shelter to protect people from the elements.

James Oughton was a member of the Republican Party and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, serving from 1964 to 1966.

One of her paternal great-grandfathers was the founder of Dwight's Keeley Institute for Alcoholics, and another great-grandfather, William D. Boyce, founded the Boy Scouts of America.

Her sisters are Carol Oughton Biondi, philanthropist and wife of Hollywood executive Frank Biondi; the late Pamela Oughton Armstrong; and Debra.

Diana Oughton left Dwight at the age of 14 to finish her high school education at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia.

In her senior year at Madeira, she was accepted by all of the Seven Sisters colleges.

With the split of SDS in 1969, she joined Weather Underground.

Oughton died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village when a nail bomb she was constructing with Terry Robbins detonated.

The bomb was to be used that evening at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates at the Fort Dix, New Jersey Army base, to "bring the [Vietnam] war home".

Oughton was born and raised in Dwight, Illinois, the eldest of four daughters.

She played the piano and the flute as a child, and enjoyed the operas and plays that her parents took her to see in Chicago.

As a child, Oughton's father taught her to handle a shotgun to be used during the pheasant season with her father at the family's shooting preserve and sometimes in the surrounding countryside of Dwight.

Oughton learned to ride horses and had been a 4-H member.

Her mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, and her father was James Henry Oughton, Jr., vice-president of the family bank and owner of a successful restaurant.