This is the full version of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famed “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered 44 years ago in Washington, DC during the March on Washington, a non-violent protest widely credited as a major influence in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The march occurred 8 years to the day after a Chicago teenager named Emmett Till was tortured and brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, and 42 years (minus a day) before Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast and, among other things, laid bare the racial and social inequalities that MLK had dreamed to erase so many years before.

Today, Venus and Serena Williams are two of the most recognized faces, not just in tennis, but in the entire sports world. But before 1950 — before Althea Gibson — black women weren’t even allowed to play the game alongside their white counterparts.

On August 22, 1950, Althea Gibson became the first black woman to compete on the U.S. Tennis Championships. She later became the first black person to win a Wimbledon title, and went on to win a number of U.S. and International titles. When her tennis career was over, she worked as the New Jersey State Commissioner of Athletics. She died in 2003 at the age of 76.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of her first U.S. Championship win, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Aretha Franklin, Carol Moseley Braun, and other boundary-breaking black women will honor Gibson on August 27, the first night of the U.S. Open.

I know little about tennis and even less about Althea Gibson (until now), and I’m kind of ashamed. If you watch the video — when they interview people on the street about the first black Wimbledon winner — you’ll know why.