Diana Oughton was an American member of the Students for a Democratic Society Michigan Chapter and later, a member of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground.
54 Facts About Diana Oughton
2.
Diana Oughton became active in SDS, eventually becoming a full-time organizer and member of the Jesse James Gang.
3.
Diana Oughton died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village when a nail bomb she was constructing with Terry Robbins detonated.
4.
Diana Oughton was born and raised in Dwight, Illinois, the eldest of four daughters.
5.
Diana Oughton played the piano and the flute as a child, and enjoyed the operas and plays that her parents took her to see in Chicago.
6.
Diana Oughton learned to ride horses and had been a 4-H member.
7.
Diana Oughton's mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, and her father was James Henry Oughton, Jr.
8.
James Diana Oughton was a member of the Republican Party and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, serving from 1964 to 1966.
9.
Diana Oughton's sisters are Carol Oughton Biondi, philanthropist and wife of Hollywood executive Frank Biondi; the late Pamela Oughton Armstrong; and Debra.
10.
Diana Oughton left Dwight at the age of 14 to finish her high school education at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia.
11.
Diana Oughton graduated from high school in 1959, entering Bryn Mawr College as a German-language major.
12.
Diana Oughton supported her Republican family's political values by opposing federal banking regulations, social security, and anything associated with big government.
13.
When she was 19, Diana 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.
14.
Diana Oughton rented a room from Gerhard Weber, the former rector of the university.
15.
Diana Oughton became friends with some of the German students, including Peter, with whom she had conversations late into the night.
16.
The book had a profound effect on Diana Oughton, prompting her to volunteer in 1962 to tutor African-American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia.
17.
Diana Oughton once told her sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who could not read.
18.
Diana Oughton was assigned to Chichicastenango, at that time an isolated indigenous market town.
19.
Diana Oughton went to Guatemala as a liberal, believing that the problems could be identified and solutions devised and carried out.
20.
Diana Oughton helped local Catholic priests implement nutritional programs and edited a left-wing Guatemalan newspaper.
21.
Diana Oughton lived in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse.
22.
Diana Oughton questioned what to do about poverty, social injustice, and revolution in the world.
23.
Diana 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.
24.
Diana Oughton left Chichicastenango with a new view of the problems that undeveloped countries like Guatemala faced when in struggle with the United States.
25.
Those who knew Diana Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Diana Oughton came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being American.
26.
In 1966, Diana 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.
27.
Later in 1966, Diana Oughton dropped almost all of her other commitments to work full-time at CCS.
28.
Diana Oughton designed a fund-raising button with a smiling face and the words "Children Are Only Newer People".
29.
Ayers and Diana 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.
30.
In March 1968, Diana Oughton helped create a women's liberation group.
31.
Later in 1968, Diana Oughton told a friend that Ayers had slept with other women while she was away for five days.
32.
Diana Oughton told the friend she tried to convince herself that it didn't matter, but it did.
33.
Diana Oughton and Ayers were participants sponsored by Eric Chester, who was a Voice-SDS leader in Ann Arbor.
34.
Diana 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.
35.
Diana Oughton replaced her friends, and she abandoned teaching for politics.
36.
Diana Oughton was impressed by Cuba's progress in literacy and medical treatment.
37.
Diana Oughton was able to escape from the Pittsburgh police, but 26 others, including Cathy Wilkerson and Jane Spielman, were arrested at the school.
38.
Diana Oughton was the presiding judge at the Chicago 8 trial.
39.
Diana Oughton's bail was set at $5,000, which her father came up from Dwight to pay.
40.
Diana Oughton managed to escape by jumping from a ground floor window.
41.
Diana Oughton returned home for a short visit around Christmas Day 1969.
42.
Diana Oughton seemed pleased to receive some clothing items and other gifts from her family.
43.
Diana Oughton made the decision at the meeting to go underground.
44.
Diana Oughton explained briefly that the group had already been active: a firebomb had been thrown at the home of Judge Murtagh, then presiding over the trial of the Panther 21.
45.
Diana Oughton did so, and the group arrived at 18 West 11th Street to decide their next move.
46.
Diana Oughton left Detroit and joined the group at the house.
47.
Four days after the explosion, detectives found some of Diana Oughton's remains near a workbench in the rubble-filled basement of the devastated townhouse.
48.
The doctor who examined Diana Oughton's remains said that she had been standing within a foot or two of the bomb when it exploded.
49.
Diana Oughton's mother was notified at the Oughton home by a member of the Dwight, Illinois police force, once Oughton's identity had been confirmed.
50.
Mr Oughton was on a business trip in London at the time of Diana's death.
51.
Diana Oughton was a revolutionary terrorist and the bomb, intended for an adjunct of the Establishment in New York, had killed her by mistake.
52.
Some children Diana Oughton had worked with at the Children's Community School pinned their fund-raising buttons, that Diana Oughton had designed and made three years prior, to a bouquet of flowers at the explosion site.
53.
Katherine, loosely based on Diana Oughton's life, is a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek, tells the story of Katherine Alman, who was from a wealthy Denver family, became socially active, served as a teacher of English in South America, then joined a radical "collective" which had many similarities to the SDS and eventually the Weather Underground.
54.
Diana Oughton is one of the individuals he uses as a case study.