RESIST (non-profit)

RESIST is a philanthropic non-profit organization based out of Somerville, Massachusetts. It has provided grants to grassroots activist organizations around the country since its inception in 1967 as a result of the anti-war proclamation “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority”.

RESIST formed in 1967 as an intellectual collective in response to the growing unrest surrounding the Vietnam War. First taking shape in the period leading up to the March on the Pentagon, Robert Barsky describes the collective’s formation in Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent:

“in recognition of his friend's long experience with activism, Paul Lauter asked Chomsky…to team up with him and others to support draft resistance. It was 1966. This was one factor leading to the formation of Resist, which, Chomsky remembers, "'very quickly became involved in other forms of resistance to illegitimate authority" (31 Mar. 1995). One of the activities in which Resist became involved was the March on the Pentagon.”

In addition to Chomsky and Lauter, others involved in the organization’s early stages included novelist Mitchell Goodman, novelist Hans Koning, poet Robert Lowell, writer Dwight Macdonald, leading lawyer for the Mobilization’s Legal Defense Committee Ed de Grazia, poet Denise Levertov, and The Armies of the Night author Norman Mailer

In the days leading up to the march, the collective penned “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” which was published in the October 12th, 1967 edition of The New York Review of Books. The manifesto was signed by hundreds including Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, William Sloane Coffin, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Wilbur H. Ferry, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Leaflets were circulated among sympathizers prior to the march detailing their intended action:

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