High Five

The high five in its modern, overhead celebratory form was first documented on October 2, 1977, when Black Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke raised his hand to meet teammate Dusty Baker at home plate after Baker’s 30th home run, a gesture the two then repeated and spread through the team and the league. The archive holds that this moment and the players’ deliberate adoption of the motion constitute the origin of the high five as a named, repeatable sports celebration, later generalized into everyday popular culture. ## The Moment of Invention On the final day of the 1977 regular season, Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first team in Major League history with four players reaching 30 homers. As Baker crossed home plate, Glenn Burke, waiting on deck, lifted his right hand high; Baker matched it with his own, creating a new, emphatic gesture of shared triumph. Contemporaneous reports and later interviews with Baker and other Dodgers players describe the motion as novel and immediately striking. Burke and Baker continued to use the gesture in subsequent games, and it spread quickly among teammates, acquiring the name “high five” and becoming part of the team’s visual identity. The Dodgers’ success and television presence carried the gesture into a national audience, where it was imitated by other players and fans. ## From Dugout Ritual to Cultural Standard Within a short period, the high five moved from a specific Burke–Baker ritual to a standard celebratory move across professional sports, youth leagues and casual play. Basketball teams, football players and children at playgrounds adopted and adapted the gesture, with television cameras capturing its use after big plays and victories. As sports broadcasting expanded in the late 1970s and 1980s, highlight reels and slow-motion replays cemented the high five as a symbol of joy, solidarity and shared achievement. Black athletes, long central to American sports spectacle, became the primary carriers of this new visual language, using the high five in combinations with chest bumps, handshakes and other ritualized movements that would later be catalogued as “sports celebrations.” ## Erasure into Anonymous Folklore Despite the specific documented origin, popular accounts have frequently treated the high five as an anonymous or vaguely “1970s” creation, sometimes offering alternative origin stories or framing it as an untraceable piece of folk behavior. This flattening is typical of how Black authorship in everyday culture is stripped when a practice becomes ubiquitous. Glenn Burke’s career was cut short amid conflicts with Dodgers management and a trade, with race and his later openness about being gay shaping both his treatment and the way his story was told. His marginalization from Major League Baseball made it easier for the league and wider media to celebrate the high five as a generic part of the game without consistently naming him as its co-author. ## Burke, Baker and the Politics of Memory Dusty Baker, who went on to a long and visible career as a manager, has publicly credited Burke with originating the high five and has repeated the story in interviews, affirming their shared authorship of the gesture. Burke himself continued to use and teach the high five in amateur games and community settings, even as his professional opportunities dwindled. Black newspapers, oral history projects and later biographies have documented Burke’s life, including the high five’s origin, his struggles with homophobia and racism in baseball, and his later years in the Bay Area. These sources re-center Burke not merely as a trivia figure but as a creative athlete whose expressive contribution reshaped the way victory is celebrated in sport. ## The High Five’s Place in Black Cultural Architecture The archive holds the high five as part of a broader Black tradition of inventing new forms of embodied communication — from call-and-response chants to end zone dances and handshake routines — that then become global standards. Burke and Baker’s gesture condensed joy, solidarity and recognition into a single movement, one now performed billions of times across cultures and contexts. By naming Burke and Baker as authors rather than diffuse “contributors,” the record affirms that even the most ordinary-seeming elements of everyday life can have specific Black creators whose names deserve to travel with their inventions.

The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.

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