In 1969, the strains of Ravi Shankar’s sitar echoed through Birmingham Town Hall, a performance noted in the Redbrick student newspaper. But the renowned Indian musician’s impact that year extended far beyond the concert hall. In the heart of Handsworth, a neighborhood marked by economic hardship and racial tension, Shankar played a quiet but pivotal role in safeguarding one of the area’s most cherished spaces: the Handsworth Adventure Playground.

The playground had become a vital sanctuary for Black children in an era when few public spaces offered safety or joy. But with funding drying up and closure imminent, the community faced a devastating loss. British actress and activist Vanessa Redgrave brought the playground’s plight to Shankar’s attention. Moved by the story, he and violinist Yehudi Menuhin agreed to headline a benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The event drew a large audience and raised the funds necessary to keep the playground open—a striking act of solidarity that linked global artistry to local anti-racist struggle.

That same year, in the classrooms and back streets of Handsworth, another movement was quietly reshaping the landscape of community resistance. Founded in 1968 by two local teachers, the Westminster Endeavour and Liaison & Development Project (WELD) emerged as a response to the institutional failure facing Black and Asian children in the British school system. What began as a modest Saturday literacy program soon expanded into a radical grassroots initiative offering everything from preschool education and mother-baby groups to sports, arts, photography, and theatre workshops.

WELD’s model was built on community empowerment and radical inclusion. It operated outside conventional frameworks of state-led education and was driven by volunteers—teachers, artists, activists, and above all, local women. They painted murals, cooked communal meals, ran art clubs, repaired buildings, and designed curriculums that centered the lived experiences of immigrant children. "The city we lived in was not designed to include us,” explained local headteacher Gilroy Brown. “So we used our own resources to build what we needed."

WELD’s influence stretched into cultural and political spheres. It was the birthplace of projects like the Handsworth Self Portrait, led by photographers Jon Stewart, Vanley Burke, Brian Homer, and Derek Bishton, capturing portraits of local residents in their own terms. While that project gained national acclaim, the women and educators who sustained WELD’s day-to-day anti-racist work remained largely unrecognized, despite forming the foundation of its success.

In many ways, the events of 1969 in Handsworth capture a broader truth about Britain’s post-imperial transition: real change often came not from institutions but from communities themselves—and from unlikely alliances between local organizers and international artists.

From Ravi Shankar’s concert halls to the classrooms of WELD, the spirit of resistance was not always loud, but it was persistent. It thrived in care, culture, and collective effort. In a time of exclusion, Handsworth made space—for children to play, for voices to be heard, and for art to become action