High Five

The modern celebratory high five was first performed and named in 1977 by Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke and his teammate Dusty Baker, turning a moment between two Black ballplayers into a gesture now used worldwide. Burke’s raised hand at home plate, Baker’s responding slap, and the teammates’ decision to repeat and name it built a new shared language of celebration in sport. From that first October afternoon at Dodger Stadium, the high five traveled through locker rooms, playgrounds and television broadcasts, carried especially by Black athletes who made it part of the visual grammar of victory and connection. What began as Burke and Baker’s invention inside Major League Baseball became one of the most recognizable gestures in popular culture, stripped in the dominant record of the names and community that authored it.

1.The First High Five

On October 2, 1977, the Los Angeles Dodgers were closing the regular season when Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run, a milestone that completed the team’s unprecedented quartet of four players with 30 home runs each. As Baker rounded the bases and approached home plate, Glenn Burke waited with his right hand raised high above his head. Instead of the familiar handshake or back slap, Baker responded by slapping Burke’s upraised palm. In that instant, they authored something new.

Teammates noticed the novel gesture, and Burke and Baker themselves recognized that they had stumbled onto a distinct way of marking triumph. They repeated the motion intentionally, turning a spontaneous moment into a signature celebration. That decision—to codify, repeat and share—marks the line between an isolated physical interaction and an invented cultural practice.

2.Naming and Spreading the Gesture

Within the Dodgers clubhouse, the motion quickly acquired a name: “high five.” Burke, known for his charisma and for keeping team spirits high, became its chief ambassador, greeting teammates with the high-raised hand and palm slap and encouraging others to adopt it. Reporters covering the Dodgers began to notice and describe the new gesture, transmitting it to audiences beyond the stadium.

As other clubs encountered the Dodgers, the high five spread through Major League Baseball. By the early 1980s, television cameras routinely captured players trading high fives after home runs, strikeouts and wins. The gesture’s simplicity—no special choreography, no equipment—and its capacity to register shared success made it ideal for replication across sports.

3.Black Athletic Creativity and Cultural Diffusion

The arc of the high five mirrors the broader trajectory of Black innovation in American sport and culture. A specific creation born in a Black player’s body language and relationships becomes generalized until its origin is presented as anonymous or inevitable. Yet the record—team testimony, contemporaneous reporting, and later oral histories—points back consistently to Burke and Baker’s 1977 exchange.

Black athletes have repeatedly authored the visual and performative language of sport: styles of running and dunking, end-zone dances, handshakes and choreographies of entrance and victory. The high five sits in that lineage, a compact, repeatable form that translates exuberance into touch. Its migration into children’s games, workplace rituals, and televised spectacle extends the reach of Burke and Baker’s invention far beyond baseball.

4.Erasure, Identity, and Ownership

Glenn Burke’s playing career was cut short in part because Major League Baseball and the Dodgers were unwilling to accept an openly gay Black man in their ranks. He was traded, marginalized and ultimately pushed out of the league. After baseball, he lived with the consequences of institutional rejection, including economic precarity and health struggles, passing away in 1995.

Despite the league’s later marketing of the high five as a generic part of the game, its originator received no formal recognition in his lifetime. The gesture’s disconnection from Burke’s name is not an accident; it is of a piece with the broader pattern of Black contribution being absorbed into the spectacle while its authors are denied stability, credit and decision-making power. Naming Burke and Baker as the inventors of the high five is therefore an act of restoration as much as documentation.

5.The High Five in Wider Popular Culture

By the late 1980s and 1990s, the high five had become ubiquitous in American life. Sitcoms, game shows, children’s programming and advertising used it as shorthand for success, teamwork and positivity. Schoolyards and churches, office corridors and family gatherings all adopted it as an everyday sign of affirmation.

In this diffusion, the gesture’s Black athletic origin is rarely mentioned, yet it remains embedded in the way the motion functions: affirming shared accomplishment, embodying mutual recognition, and carrying a feeling of playfulness that Burke embodied on the field. The archive traces that path and insists that when millions of people meet palm to palm in celebration, they are moving inside a form authored by two Black ballplayers in Los Angeles, whose creative act deserves to stand in the record.

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.

6.References