“The first free black man I've ever seen.”

Fifty years ago, Arthur Ash stopped the incredible feat, upsetting his odds and became the first black man to win the Wimbledon Men's Finals when he defeated America's Jimmy Connors, but that wasn't what he wanted to define his life.

His fight to break the barriers regarding racism was close to his heart – and South Africa became one of his battlefields.

“I don't want to remember in the final analysis of winning Wimbledon… I applaud you for doing it, but that's not the most important thing in my life – it's not even close,” he said in a BBC interview a year before his death in 1993.

Nevertheless, his centre court victory on July 5, 1975 was welcomed as one of the sporting moments that stabbed the spine that stopped everyone on their tracks, whether tennis fans or not, and is commemorated by a special exhibition at the Wimbledon Museum.

Ash was already in his 30s, tall, calm, quiet and even. Ten years younger, defending champion Connors was an offensive player and was often referred to as “Brattish.”

Ash's achievements and the skills and courage he showed to the court certainly matched his actions.

In the early 1970s, South Africa repeatedly refused to issue a visa for him to travel to the country with other US players.

The white Minority government there was legalizing an extreme system of racism known as apartheid or apartments in 1948.

Authorities said the decision to ban him was based on his “general hostility” and honest remarks about South Africa.

However, in 1973, the government tolerated and admitted Ash's visa to play in the South African Open, one of the top tournaments in the world at the time.

It was Ash's first visit to South Africa, and although he stipulated that the stadium would play on the condition as it was open to both black and white audiences, it sparked rage among US anti-apartheid activists and brought strong opposition from a section of South Africa's black community.

British journalist and tennis historian Richard Evans, who became Ash's lifelong friend, was a member of the press squad on his tour of South Africa.

He says that Ash “painfully aware” of criticism and accusations that he had somehow given the South African government legitimacy, but he decided to see for himself how people live there.

“He always felt he was being asked about South Africa, but he never went. He said: “How can I comment where I don't know? I need to look at it and judge it. And I can't do that until I go.”

Evans recalls that while on tour, South African writer and poet Don Matta had organized for Ash to meet a group of black journalists, but the atmosphere was tense and hostile.

“When I overtook someone, Evans told the BBC, “I heard someone say 'Uncle Tom' — a slurred used to lightly parry black people who are considered service to white people.

“And then one or two very vocal journalists stood up and said, “Arthur, come home. We don't want you here. You can show that the government is allowing someone like you.”

However, not all black South Africans were vehemently opposed Ash's presence within the country.

South African author, Academic Martima Tabane grew up in Alexandra Township (commonly known as Alex) in northern Johannesburg. Such a town was set up under apartheid on the outskirts of the city for non-white people to live in.

He first realised Ash as a boy and accompanied her grandmother to her gardening work in a British family mansion in a white-only suburb.

The woman in the house gave him a September edition of Life Magazine from her collection, and there was Arthur Ash wearing glasses on the net on the front cover.

Matabane was fascinated by the image and its cover line “Arthur Ash's icy elegance,” and he tried to emulate him.

When Ash went on a tour in 1973, Matabane had only one mission to meet Ash or at least get closer to him.

The opportunity came when Ash took a break from the competition to host a tennis clinic in Soweto, a town in southern Johannesburg.

Matabane, 13, arrived there and took a train journey to join other black scores.

“He may have been from honorary white to white, but for our black people he was a saipho. That's the Zulu word for a gift,” Matabane, now 64, told the BBC.

“As you know, a God gift from our ancestors. This means it is incredibly precious.

The excitement created at Soweto Clinic was not only part of the town, but also spread across the country, he said.

From country reservations to Shaveen and Speak Agee (bars) – wherever black people gathered, they talked about Ash's visit.

“For me, he was literally the first free black man I've ever seen,” Matabane said.

After the 1973 tour, Ash returned to South Africa several more times. In early 1976 he helped establish the Arthur Ash Soweto Tennis Centre (AASTC) for township budding players.

However, shortly after it opened, the center was destroyed in a student-led uprising against the apartheid regime that broke out in June of that year.

It remained neglected and devastated for several years before undergoing a major renovation in 2007, and was reopened by Jeanne Moot Samy Ache, Ache's widow.

The complex has 16 courthouses, hosting libraries and skills development centres.

The ambition is to produce tennis stars and grand slam champions from the township. And legends like Serena and Venus Williams run clinics there.

For Mothobi Seseli and Masodi Xaba, formerly South African national champions and now sitting on the AASTC board, the centre is beyond tennis.

They feel that it is essentially about instilling a variety of life skills and a work ethic that gives them confidence.

“We're building a young leader,” Xaba, a successful businessman, told the BBC.

Seseli, an entrepreneur born and raised in Soweto, agrees that this is also Ash's vision.

Ash initially tended to challenge apartheid through conversation and participation. I believed this could become visible domestically and to win games could undermine the very foundations of the administration.

However, his experience in South Africa and international pressure from the anti-apartheid movement have convinced him that isolation rather than engagement is the most effective way to bring about change in South Africa.

He has become a powerful advocate and advocate for South Africa's international sports boycott speaking before the UN and the US Congress.

In 1983, at a joint press conference founded by African Unity (OAU) and the United Nations organization, he spoke with American singer Harry Belafonte about the purpose of artists and athletes against apartheid, who had just co-founded it.

The organization approached sanctions against the South African government, with over 500 members at its height.

Ash joined many protests and rallies, and when he was arrested outside the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. in 1985, it helped to draw more international attention to the cause and amplify the global condemnation of the South African administration.

He was the captain of the US Davis Cup team at the time, and always felt that the arrest had cost him his job.

Ash used his platform to confront social injustice where he saw it, not only in Africa and South Africa, but also in the US and Haiti.

He was also an educator for many problems, particularly HIV/AIDS, after contracting the disease from a blood transfusion during heart surgery in the early 1980s.

However, he was particularly familiar with the black South African population living under a oppressive regime.

He said he identified with them for his upbringing in Richmond, racially segregated in Virginia, USA.

It's no wonder Ash was one of the key figures that South Africa's anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela was enthusiastic about meeting on a trip to New York, and invited him to the historic town hall that would gather in 1990 shortly after his 27 years of release from prison.

The pair met several times, but Ash did not live to see Mandela become South Africa's president after the 1994 election.

But like Ash, Mandela could use sports to seek change, especially at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when he wore the Springbok jersey, which was once an iconic symbol of apartheid.

To celebrate Ash's victory anniversary this year, the Wimbledon Championship will be installing at the International Tennis Centre Tunnel and offering a new museum display about him. They are also taking part in Trailblazer workshops on the road to mark his achievements.

His Wimbledon title was third in his Grand Slam Crown, previously winning the US and Australian Opens.

But for many people like Matabane, who became the first black African to win a tennis scholarship to a US university in 1978, Arthur Ash's legacy was his activism, not his tennis.

“He literally helped me free my mind from the spiritual chains of self-doubt,” he said, believing in the big lies about your inferiority and the fact that you are destined to repeat your parents' work as a drugg, to repeat it,” he said.

“That was magic – because he had shown me the possibility.”