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.FBI files part 2, pg. 3.
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.Powers, p. 87 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".Powers, p. 183
Early life and education 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.Cantor, p. 1
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.Powers, p. 11
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. 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.Powers, pp. 10-11 Her sisters were Deborah Oughton; Carol Oughton Biondi, philanthropist and wife of Hollywood executive Frank Biondi; and the late Pamela Oughton Armstrong.
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.Powers/Franks, pg. 3 She 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 LMU 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. She once told her sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who could not read.Powers/Frank, p. 3
Guatemala 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.Powers/Franks 2 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.Powers 34 Eventually, she became a radical and began to feel an urgency to change everything at once.Varon 47 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.Ayers 95 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.
According to Thomas Powers, the author of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, the more Oughton learned about the hard life of rural Guatemala, the more she reflected on the affluence of the United States. In Chichicastenango, Americans seemed an alien presence; the fact of their wealth was almost an insult to the impoverished Indians. In her mind, confusion emerged that lasted the rest of her life: She had rejected affluence (at first almost unconsciously) to work among the poor, but poverty, clearly, was nothing to be envied. She hated poverty as well as affluence.Powers 35 Oughton left Chichicastenango with a new view of the problems that undeveloped countries like Guatemala faced when in struggle with the United States.
Those who knew Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Oughton came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being American.Powers 37 In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers writes that Oughton "had had an abundance of experience in Guatemala, a torrent, almost more than she could endure. She now sometimes suffered the full flood of her experiences."Ayers 94 Oughton became much more aware of the United States' impact on foreign countries, and she did not return to Philadelphia as the same Midwest Republican. Oughton's friends from college noticed upon her return to the United States how she had matured, displaying sadness regarding the poverty she encountered in Guatemala in the previous two years.Powers 31
Children's Community School In 1966, Oughton left Philadelphia for Ann Arbor, Michigan to enroll in the University of Michigan Graduate School of Education, seeking her Master of Arts degree in teaching. In Michigan, she began to work part-time at the Children's Community School (CCS), a project established by Toby HendonPowers 33 and based on the Summerhill method of education. Children were allowed to do what they liked when they liked, on the premise that both teaching and learning were most successful when most spontaneous.Powers 59 The CCS mission was to treat the children with love and understanding, in hopes that violent thoughts would not consume the child's personality. The school also tried to establish complete equality between white and black students and to involve parents in the running of the school, so that it might be a community in the largest sense of the word.Powers 61
Later in 1966, Oughton dropped almost all of her other commitments to work full-time at CCS. She designed a fund-raising button with a smiling face and the words "Children Are Only Newer People".Powers 69 At CCS, Oughton met teacher Bill Ayers. The two fell in love and soon began living together. In 1968, the school ran into severe problems, such as the fact that few students learned to read, and lost its funding, so Oughton and Ayers sought to become active elsewhere in the community.
SDS and the Jesse James Gang Ayers and Oughton were involved with Students for a Democratic Society while working at CCS, but it was not until after the closure of the school that they became involved as full-time organizers. Their lives became consumed by meetings, organizing, and planning actions.Powers 39
It was during this time that Ayers and Oughton met Terry Robbins. In March 1968, Oughton helped create a women's liberation group.Powers 73 The group met every week or so, wherever the women could find room. Most of the talk seemed to center on the subordinate role of women in the radical movement and on the sexual oppression of women by the "macho" tendency of males to regard sex as conquest. During these meetings, Oughton often discussed the role that women played in the SDS, which was a combination of being a sexual object, an office clerk, and a housekeeper.Powers, p. 41
Later in 1968, Oughton told a friend that Ayers had slept with other women while she was away for five days. She told the friend she tried to convince herself that it didn't matter, but it did.
Also in 1968, Oughton and Ayers became part of the Jesse James Gang, which banded together with about 40 others against the moderates. The Jesse James Gang replaced the University of Michigan SDS chapter, and Robbins, Oughton, and Ayers worked in partnership with Jim Mellen from the Revolutionary Youth Movement Group.Varon 40 The Vietnam War entered its third year in the middle of 1968. The early student movement had taken their moral stance from the teachings of Albert Camus, who taught that thinking men have the responsibility to find a way in the world to be neither a victim or the executioner. Four events in 1968 turned the American student movement into self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist revolutionaries: the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive, the student sit-in at Columbia University, the near-revolution in France, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Each event helped change the way American radicals viewed their own situations.
By the end of 1968, the revolutionaries were tired of waiting for change and no longer had allegiance to or trust in America's democracy. One of the few actions by the Jesse James Gang occurred on the University of Michigan campus while Robben Fleming, the university president, was speaking to a group of students inside a school building. Oughton spoke outside with a portable address system while the Jesse James Gang handed out sliced pieces of bread, shouting "Here's the bread. Get the baloney inside."
The 1968 annual national SDS convention was held at Michigan State University. Oughton and Ayers were participants sponsored by Eric Chester, who was a Voice-SDS leader in Ann Arbor. The gang insisted that action was the only thing likely to create a situation in which radical solutions to American problems would be considered.Powers 89 The Gang offered a tight, validating community within which members could express their rage and frustration about the status quo and their empathy for suffering.Wilkerson 226
Weatherman With the split of SDS in 1969, Oughton and Ayers joined the Weatherman faction. Oughton found it difficult to get along with her father; she saw her parents' lives in Dwight, Illinois as complacent and secure, and lives in the impoverished sections of Chicago and Detroit as chaotic.Powers 49 At this time, SDS protests became more violent and radical. Oughton and Ayers had been drifting apart since December 1968. Monogamy, according to Ayers, interfered with his political work. Oughton replaced her friends, and she abandoned teaching for politics. Merrill Rosenberg told Oughton "Revolution means violence and risk, or it is only talk. The Weathermen's arguments pointed to their conclusion that the time was now to fight."