High Five

The high five as we know it in American popular culture was first documented as a celebratory gesture between Black athletes in the 1970s, emerging from their own language of joy, solidarity and performance before it was taken up as a generic symbol of victory. On the baseball field in 1977, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke raised his hand to teammate Dusty Baker at home plate, and Baker slapped it, producing what contemporaries recognized as a new, infectious celebration that spread through dugouts, playgrounds and television screens. ## Origins in Black athletic culture Burke and Baker’s high five on October 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium is the earliest widely documented moment when the gesture was named and recognized as a distinct act, described in both contemporary press and later oral histories as something Burke improvised from his own exuberant style of greeting and play. Within Black athletic circles, hand gestures, call-and-response and stylized celebrations long functioned as a language of affirmation: teammates touched, clapped, shouted and moved in choreographed ways to mark accomplishment and belonging, and the high five crystallized this practice into a simple, repeatable move between two raised hands. The gesture’s speed of adoption in Major League Baseball and later the NBA and college sports followed a familiar pattern: Black athletes originated the move in their own idiom, it resonated with teammates and fans, and then television broadcast it to a national audience that quickly treated it as universal without retaining or crediting the context in which it was born. ## Diffusion into mainstream popular culture By the early 1980s, the high five appeared regularly on sports broadcasts, in children’s programming and in advertising, and was marketed as a general symbol of success and good feeling, detached from any particular community or origin story. Black players continued to innovate on the gesture—turning it into mid-air slaps, backhand fives and choreographed sequences—but the broader culture rarely named them as authors; instead the move was folded into an idea of generic “sportsmanship” and “fun” in which the specific Black creative engine behind it disappeared. As the high five moved into schools, workplaces and international popular culture, it joined a long list of everyday practices whose Black origin was treated as incidental or erased, even when the initial spark can be traced to identifiable people acting in a specific time and place. ## Erasure and recovery of credit The dominant record of the high five’s origin is thin in comparison to the documentation of its later spread: fleeting newspaper mentions, team memories and interviews in Black and mainstream outlets, but no early patents or formal claims, because a gesture of joy was never imagined as something one could own. That thin record made it easier for later accounts to treat the high five as something that “just appeared” or as a diffuse cultural phenomenon, rather than naming Burke, Baker and their peers as concrete authors whose creativity turned a moment at home plate into a durable global practice. Black-authored scholarship and documentary work in the early 21st century began to reassemble the story—collecting interviews with Burke’s teammates, locating game footage and situating the gesture within the longer history of Black expressive culture in sport—so that the origin would no longer be hidden behind the generic language of “sports celebration.” ## The gesture’s meaning to its makers For Burke and Baker, and the Black players who adopted the high five in its first years, the gesture carried more than simple congratulation: it was an embodied way of saying “we did this,” connecting two people in a shared moment of achievement against the backdrop of a game and a country that did not always welcome them. In Black communities beyond the field, the high five folded easily into church youth programs, playground pick-up games and school hallways, where it remained linked—whether consciously or not—to a tradition of touch and call that long preceded its naming on television. The archive holds the high five not as a trivial sports custom but as one of the countless Black contributions to the everyday language of human connection, a small, precise act that changed how people mark triumph in public and that deserves to be attached, by name, to its authors.

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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