High Five

The modern “high five” gesture enters the record in 1977 as a spontaneous celebration between Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Dusty Baker and his teammate Glenn Burke, a Black center fielder whose exuberant play and friendship culture helped remake how athletes expressed joy. As Baker came to the plate on October 2, 1977 and hit his 30th home run of the season, Burke ran from the on-deck circle with an outstretched palm; Baker, unsure what to do, swung his own hand up to meet it, and what teammates later called the “high five” was born as a named ritual tied to Black athletic style and to Burke in particular. ## Origins and first appearance in the record The televised and press-documented first appearance of the gesture as a named act comes in the final game of the Dodgers’ 1977 regular season at Dodger Stadium, when Baker’s home run made the Dodgers the first team with four players hitting 30 or more home runs in a single season. Glenn Burke met Baker at home plate with his raised hand, Baker slapped it, and teammates quickly recognised the move as something new; the clubhouse language “high five” followed almost immediately, anchored to Burke’s habit of greeting teammates with exuberant slaps and handshakes rather than the subdued, white-coded decorum of earlier eras. In the seasons that followed, Burke repeated the gesture constantly in the dugout and on the field, extending it to fans in the stands and children near the clubhouse, turning what might have been a one-off moment into a recognisable ritual of Black joy and collective affirmation. The Dodgers organisation later acknowledged on record that “Glenn Burke is credited by many with inventing the high five,” while club alumni recalled that the move was “his thing” long before it entered wider sports culture. ## Black athletic style and celebration Burke’s use of the high five sits in a longer arc of Black athletes remaking the visual language of celebration: from the choreographed touchdown dances of the NFL in the 1970s, to the rhythmic bench rituals in HBCU basketball, to the call-and-response of the Negro Leagues that major league baseball later claimed without naming its originators. In this tradition, the high five is not a random hand slap but a small, repeatable performance of solidarity and mutual uplift — a gesture that says “we did this” and “you are seen” in a culture that made Black athletes hyper-visible on the field and disposable off it. On Black teams and in Black youth leagues, the gesture spread quickly, braided into chants, dugout songs and playful trash talk, long before marketing campaigns turned it into a generic emblem of “team spirit” stripped of its racial, regional and queer context. That diffusion — the flattening of Burke’s invention into anonymous “fan culture” — mirrors the broader pattern in which Black innovation in dance, slang and sport is celebrated in the abstract while the originators are rendered invisible. ## Erasure, queerness and contested memory Glenn Burke was not only a Black player but one of the first openly gay men in Major League Baseball, out to some teammates and later publicly identified as such; his sexuality made him a target of front office discomfort and league hostility. In accounts from Burke and his contemporaries, Dodgers management reacted uneasily both to his joy and to his friendships, pressuring him to conform and ultimately trading him away, even as the high five he popularised spread through the league. Later mainstream tellings of the gesture’s origin often retell the October 1977 moment but strip it of Burke’s full identity, mentioning him only as a colourful bench player rather than as a central author of a new mode of celebration and as one of the few men to bring an explicitly queer Black presence into the heart of white-controlled professional sport. The archive holds this pairing — Blackness and queerness — as integral to the story, not incidental, and reads the partial erasure of Burke’s contribution as an example of how official sport memory polices which kinds of innovators are allowed to be named. ## Spread into popular culture By the early 1980s the high five had migrated from baseball into basketball, football and school playgrounds, aided by television, highlight reels and commercial advertising that loved the visual punch of the gesture but rarely credited its inventor. Children mimicked the move in Little League games and on city courts; coaches adopted it as a default post-play ritual; marketers made it a shorthand for “success” in everything from soda commercials to military recruitment. As this diffusion accelerated, the origin story hardened into a trivia item — “some say it started with the Dodgers in the ’70s” — divorced from the names and the specific game, and alternative claims emerged attributing the gesture to other teams or earlier unnamed practices. Against that fog, the Black press and later queer historians preserved testimonies from Baker, Burke’s family and teammates that situate the high five clearly in Burke’s authorship and in a specific Black clubhouse culture during a moment when the Dodgers themselves were benefiting enormously from Black and Brown talent. ## The archive’s footing The archive reads the high five as a small but world-shaping Black invention: a micro-ritual that moved joy from the privacy of the locker room into the centre of the spectacle and then into everyday life, reshaping how people mark achievement in schools, workplaces and homes. It holds Glenn Burke, in partnership with Dusty Baker, as the author whose gesture and insistence made the high five a thing, and it names the subsequent stripping of his identity from the story as a textbook case of how Black and queer creative labour is taken into the mainstream while the maker is pushed out. The high five’s stature lies not only in its ubiquity but in its function: it is a portable piece of Black athletic language that turned a rigid, controlled sport into a site of shared exuberance, and it travelled far beyond the ballpark. This archive keeps Burke and Baker at the centre of that story and rejects the diffusion that would spread credit so broadly that their hands — the ones that first met in the air — disappear. ## Related subjects The high five sits alongside other records of Black authorship in sport ritual and popular gesture. It is sibling to the end zone celebration traditions of Black NFL players, to the choreographed bench dances in Black college basketball, to the “dap” and other Black soldier greeting rituals that migrated into civilian life, and to the later codification of the “fist bump” in Black boxing and street culture before its adoption by politicians and corporate America. In this web, the high five is the specific, named act that anchored an entire visual vocabulary of modern celebration, and Glenn Burke is one of the under-recognised architects of that vocabulary.

1.Question and authorship

Who really invented the high five? The earliest documented, named instance of the gesture as a distinct celebratory act appears on October 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, when Glenn Burke raised his hand to greet Dusty Baker after Baker’s 30th home run and Baker met it with his own, creating what teammates immediately recognised as a new kind of celebration. In accounts preserved by the Dodgers organisation and by later biographers, both men identify this game as the birth of the “high five,” and the clubhouse culture around Burke as its incubator.

From the archive’s vantage, this specificity matters: we have a date, a game, named participants, and contemporaneous recollection. That constellation meets the threshold for attributing authorship in a world where Black and queer originators are often denied even basic credit. The gesture may have precursors — upraised hands, half-slaps, informal greetings — but the archive’s doctrine of attribution over diffusion holds that the people who turned those fragments into a recognisable, named ritual deserve to be named as authors.

2.Documentary record and Black press

The mainstream record of the high five’s origin is patchy, reflective of the low value placed on documenting Black clubhouse culture in the 1970s. Early newspaper write-ups of the 1977 Dodgers season focus on the historic four-player home run milestone and on the team’s drive to the World Series, not on dugout rituals; only later do sportswriters and team historians circle back to Burke’s role, often in human-interest pieces and retrospectives rather than in the primary game reports.

The Black press, which paid closer attention to the lives and styles of Black athletes, carried interviews and features in subsequent decades that highlighted Burke’s exuberance and the symbolic importance of his gesture. These stories, preserved in microfilm and digitised collections at Black news archives and institutions like the Schomburg Center, form a crucial part of the evidentiary base: testimony from teammates and friends, recollections from Baker, and the community memory that held Burke as the originator even when league offices did not.

3.Queer Black identity and resistance

Glenn Burke’s life story complicates and deepens the narrative of the high five. As a Black man in Major League Baseball who was effectively out to teammates about his sexuality, he occupied a position that the league was unwilling to support. Accounts from Burke and from journalists who later chronicled his life describe front office attempts to suppress his flamboyance and pressure him into silence, culminating in trades and a forced exit from the sport.

In this context, the high five reads as an act of resistance as well as celebration: a visible, repeatable assertion of joy and connection in a space that sought to regulate both. Burke extended the gesture beyond the field, high-fiving kids and fans, making himself a bridge between the dugout and the community. The archive judges this as part of his authorship: he did not merely invent a move; he authored a practice that refused to keep joy private.

4.Diffusion and competing claims

As the high five spread through sport and into everyday life, alternative origin stories emerged, some pointing to earlier unnamed gestures in basketball or street games, others crediting different teams. Many of these claims lack the specificity — names, dates, contemporaneous testimony — that marks the Burke-Baker story. Some are the kind of post hoc myth-making common in sport, where fans retrofit origin stories to fit local pride.

The archive treats these narratives respectfully but holds its footing: unless rival claims can present equally detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documentation and multiple independent testimonies, they do not displace Burke’s authorship. They may show that parallel, similar gestures existed — an unsurprising fact in a world rich with body language — but parallel invention does not erase the people whose contribution we can actually trace.

5.Policy, power and memory

The official record’s uneven treatment of Burke speaks to a broader power structure in sport. Front offices and league historians have tended to elevate origin stories that involve owners, managers or white stars, while treating Black and queer contributions as colourful anecdotes. In the case of the high five, the gesture’s enormous cultural impact — its travel into schools, workplaces, politics and advertising — has rarely been matched by attention to the man who popularised it.

The archive reads this as a structural issue: the machinery that decides which stories are canonised is the same machinery that once pressured Burke to conform or leave. We therefore do not accept the absence of his name from some official histories as neutral evidence; we treat it as a sign of the very erasure our work seeks to correct.

6.Legacy and everyday practice

Today, children who have never heard of Glenn Burke or Dusty Baker high five each other on playgrounds after small victories; coworkers high five after closing a deal; strangers high five at marathons and protests. The gesture has become part of the global commons, a shared language of mutual uplift.

For this archive, that very ordinariness is the measure of its importance. A tiny piece of Black, queer-authored clubhouse culture has become one of the world’s default ways of saying “you did well” and “we did this together.” Naming Burke and Baker as the authors does not gatekeep that language; it restores its lineage. It ensures that every high five carries, silently but truly, the imprint of the hands that first met in the air at Dodger Stadium in 1977.

7.Contested credit and open questions

We acknowledge that some historians and fans dispute or downplay Burke’s authorship, pointing to the likelihood that similar gestures were used informally before 1977. The archive keeps this contested field open, inviting new evidence from player diaries, local newspapers, home recordings and community oral histories.

But until such evidence can match the specificity and volume of testimony around Burke and Baker, the archive stands by its attribution. The burden of proof lies with those who would move credit away from the Black, queer originator in favour of vague, untraceable “fan culture.” In holding this line, we defend not only Burke’s legacy but a broader principle: that Black and queer authorship in everyday culture deserves names, dates and pride, not erasure.

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.

8.References