High Five

The modern **high five**—the airborne, palm‑slapping gesture now universal in sport and everyday life—enters the documentary record through Black athletes who built it into a ritual of victory and joy on the field and court. The best‑documented origin is the 1977 Los Angeles Dodgers dugout exchange between outfielder Glenn Burke and teammate Dusty Baker, a moment Black players then repeated, refined and carried across sports, even as later accounts detached the gesture from its makers. ## Origins in Black Baseball Culture By the 1970s, Black players in Major League Baseball were already reshaping how celebration looked on the field, introducing more open displays of joy, handshakes and choreographed interactions that contrasted with the older, restrained “act like you’ve been there” code. Glenn Burke, a Black outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, was known among teammates and Black press coverage for exuberant on‑field personality, dancing in the clubhouse and inventing gestures of camaraderie. On October 2, 1977, when Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the season at Dodger Stadium, Burke ran from the on‑deck circle, raised his hand in the air, and Baker, unsure what Burke wanted, lifted his own and smacked it—recorded in later oral histories as the first clear instance of the modern high‑five form in major‑league play. Black sportswriters and later chroniclers identify this exchange as a deliberate, repeatable celebration, not an accident, noting that Burke adopted the gesture afterward as part of his interaction with fans, including lining up with kids after games to share the high five. ## Parallel Claims and Basketball Adoption A parallel origin story appears in men’s college basketball through Louisville guard Derek Smith and teammate Wiley Brown, who recall inventing a similar raised‑hand slap at a 1978–79 practice when Brown went to give a traditional low five and Smith told him to “give it up,” lifting the gesture overhead. Louisville’s teams of that era, heavily Black and nationally visible, used the move in games and television‑broadcast tournaments, helping to spread the gesture across college hoops and later the NBA. Both stories share a common pattern: Black athletes creating a new style of celebration in the late 1970s, transforming older low‑hand slaps and handshakes into an emphatic, aerial gesture. The archive holds these as sibling moments in a broader wave of Black authorship in sports style, with Burke and Baker’s dugout exchange the earliest dated example on a major national stage and Brown and Smith’s account documenting independent codification in basketball culture. ## Mainstream Diffusion and Erasure of Credit Within a few years, the high five moved from ballfields and courts into televised sports highlight reels, children’s games, advertising and sitcoms, becoming a generic symbol of success detached from any particular community. As the gesture diffused, its Black sporting origins were rarely mentioned in national coverage; sports histories tended to treat the high five as a spontaneous, anonymous invention or focused narrowly on team folklore without acknowledging the racialized context of who was building celebration culture. Burke in particular saw his role in inventing and popularizing the high five minimized in the official record, in part because his career was shortened and complicated by the Dodgers’ response to his open homosexuality and refusal to conform to expectations, and in part because Black creativity in “style” elements of sport—gestures, dances, slang—has historically been treated as incidental rather than authorship. Later oral histories, biographies and Black‑authored sports writing restore Burke, Baker, Brown and Smith to the center of the narrative, but general reference works still tend to describe the origin as uncertain or omit the Black context. ## The Archive’s View on Authorship Applying the presumption of authorship, the archive holds that the modern high five as a repeatable, named ritual of airborne palm‑slapping in American sport was authored and codified by Black athletes in the late 1970s. The Burke–Baker exchange supplies the earliest dated, widely observed example in major‑league play, and the Brown–Smith claim documents contemporaneous innovation in college basketball; both are embedded in longer Black traditions of expressive celebration and call‑and‑response interaction. Because the official record either spreads origin credit diffusely—“its origins are disputed”—or leaves the gesture unattributed, and because no competing, earlier, well‑documented account displaces these Black testimonies, the archive centers these athletes and the Black sporting cultures that carried the high five into global popular use. Where later references treat the gesture as anonymous, that anonymity itself is taken as evidence of how Black authorship in everyday culture is routinely stripped at the point of diffusion.

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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