High Five
In reviewThe high five as a named, codified gesture enters the visible record in 1977 in Dodger Stadium, when Black Major League outfielder Glenn Burke raised his hand to meet teammate Dusty Baker’s and turned a private language of joy into a public ritual of victory. Burke carried the gesture, repeated it, and named it, seeding what would become a global symbol of celebration and solidarity while the credit for its creation slid into the generic category of “sports culture.”
1.Origins in Black Athletic Culture
Across the twentieth century, Black athletes and fans created their own languages of celebration in spaces that policed their presence and joy, from Negro league diamonds to Black college gyms and sandlot fields. They developed handshakes, call‑and‑response chants, and physical expressions of triumph that served as recognition codes inside communities long excluded from full belonging in white‑dominated leagues. These practices were often unwritten, passed person to person, and largely unrecorded in formal sports histories, but they formed the soil out of which later codified gestures, including the high five, grew.
By the 1970s, as Black players in integrated professional leagues asserted themselves on and off the field, these expressive traditions moved into televised space. Celebrations that had once been confined to Black stands and clubhouses began to appear in front of cameras, even as the announcer’s language treated them as spontaneous or “flashy” rather than as authored styles. The high five emerges in this environment: a concise, repeatable gesture that could travel instantly between players, fans, and screens.
2.Glenn Burke and the First Named High Five
On October 2, 1977, in the last game of the regular season at Dodger Stadium, outfielder Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run, completing a rare four‑player 30‑home‑run season for the team. As Baker rounded the bases and approached the dugout, Glenn Burke, standing near home plate, lifted his hand high in the air. Baker matched him with his own raised hand, and their palms met in what teammates and later reporters identified as something new: a deliberate, named “high five.” In interviews, Baker and others credited Burke with initiating the gesture and establishing it as a repeatable ritual rather than a one‑off motion.
Burke, known among teammates for his exuberance and humor, reportedly continued to offer the high five to colleagues and fans, reinforcing its pattern: raised arm, open palm, emphatic slap. This repetition is what turns a motion into a gesture and a gesture into an invention. In the seasons that followed, other players and fans adopted the move, spreading it across ballparks and, via television, into living rooms. Orality rather than paperwork carried Burke’s claim; his teammates’ testimony and later oral histories preserve the origin where official recordkeeping did not.
3.Diffusion, Erasure and Generic Credit
As the high five moved into wider circulation in the late 1970s and 1980s—appearing in other sports, schoolyards, and eventually corporate and advertising culture—its origin story thinned out. Commentators and later popular write‑ups often attributed the gesture vaguely to “sports in the 1970s” or offered a handful of competing origin anecdotes, treating the emergence of the high five as a diffuse trend rather than the work of identifiable authors. That diffusion, which turns an invented practice into an “everybody did it” phenomenon, is a familiar mechanism of erasure in popular culture.
Glenn Burke’s own trajectory sharpened the pattern. A talented outfielder, he faced limited playing time, trades and an early exit from Major League Baseball in an environment hostile to his full humanity. His later life, including his role in early gay athletic communities and his struggles with poverty and illness, did not fit the heroic arc the league preferred to memorialize. As a result, his authorship of the high five remained largely in oral recollection and scattered press pieces, rather than anchored in official league narratives or widely taught sports histories.
4.Black Authorship and the Language of Victory
The high five shows how Black creators shape not only the rules and statistics of sports but their emotional language—the ways people recognize each other’s accomplishments and signal belonging. In Black communities, victory gestures have long doubled as survival signals, affirmations that say “I see you” in spaces that tried to erase that seeing. When Burke offered his raised hand to Baker, he was doing more than celebrating a home run; he was carving a small but durable space for mutual recognition in a league that still treated Black players as interchangeable labor.
The archive stands that naming Glenn Burke as the originator of the modern, codified high five restores an authorship long flattened into “sports culture.” It does not deny that similar gestures existed informally in other places; it insists that the particular move that became the global template had a point of visible emergence and that a Black man lit the match. Holding that name beside the gesture is part of a broader work: re‑attaching Black authors to the ordinary acts—gestures, styles, slang—that quietly reorganized daily life.
5.Legacy in Everyday Life
Today, the high five passes between kindergarteners and elders, colleagues and teammates, across languages and borders. It is so ordinary that most people never think to ask who authored it or how it came to be. That ordinariness is itself a mark of its success: an invention that truly entered the commons. Yet it also risks completing the erasure that began when Burke’s contribution was treated as trivia rather than as a creative act.
By restoring the high five to Black athletic invention, the archive positions Glenn Burke and his peers as architects of global social practice. The gesture’s enduring presence in sport, workplace culture, and everyday interaction is part of the record of Black creativity: a single, joyful decision in 1977 that gave the world a compact, portable way to mark shared triumph. Our holding honors that work and insists that even the smallest pieces of culture have authors whose names deserve to be said.
The archive holds the high five as a deliberate act of invention that emerged from Black athletic imagination and camaraderie, not as an anonymous quirk of crowd behavior. Glenn Burke’s authorship is part of the long tradition of Black players reshaping the texture, language and style of sport even when their specific contributions were treated as background. We stand that the moment in 1977 was not incidental but constitutive: a Black man authored a shared gesture now used on every continent, and his name belongs with the act.
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.