High Five (gesture)
In reviewThe high five, now a global gesture of celebration, has its clearest documented origin in a moment between two Black Major League Baseball players, Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke, at Dodger Stadium on October 2, 1977. They turned a raised-hand greeting into a ritualized slap that spread through the Los Angeles Dodgers clubhouse and then outward across sport and popular culture. That game, in which Baker hit his 30th home run of the season, ended with Burke running from the on-deck circle, hand held high, and Baker swinging his own up to meet it—according to multiple eyewitnesses, this was the first time the gesture appeared as a deliberate act on a major sports stage. Within weeks, Dodgers players were repeating it after big plays, and Burke was using it with fans, reporters and children around the ballpark. As the gesture moved from the dugout to televised broadcasts and then into everyday life, its Black authorship faded from the standard record. Later retellings have credited college volleyball players or generic ‘sports culture’ without naming the two men who made it iconic. The archive centers Baker and Burke’s role in evolving the high five from spontaneous joy to shared ritual. It also notes the context: Burke, a gay Black man whose career was constrained by homophobia and racism, used the gesture as part of a whole style of exuberant, physical connection that did not fit the era’s expectations for Black athletes. The high five belongs in the record alongside other Black-authored gestures and sounds—like the fist bump, call-and-response chants, and end zone dances—that moved from Black spaces into global vernacular while their originators remained unnamed or contested.
1.Origin in the Los Angeles Dodgers dugout
On October 2, 1977, the Los Angeles Dodgers faced the Houston Astros at Dodger Stadium. In the fourth inning, Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the season, making the Dodgers the first team in Major League history with four players hitting 30 home runs in a single year. As Baker rounded the bases and approached home plate, teammate Glenn Burke waited on deck.
Multiple accounts—by Baker, Burke’s teammates, and later journalists—describe Burke holding his hand high over his head as Baker approached. Baker, unsure what Burke intended but sensing celebration, raised his own hand and slapped Burke’s. That improvised moment became a repeated ritual: by the end of the game, other Dodgers were copying it after big plays.
In the weeks that followed, Burke continued to deploy the gesture in the clubhouse and with fans. He would high-five children in the stands and reporters in the locker room. This cross-context use helped shift the gesture from a baseball quirk to a recognizable symbol of shared joy.
2.Codification and spread through sport
The high five quickly became part of the Dodgers’ identity, visible on television broadcasts as players celebrated home runs and key defensive plays. Other teams began to adopt the gesture, particularly in the National League West, where they saw it regularly during games against the Dodgers.
As the practice spread across baseball, it also appeared in basketball, where players already used hand-slapping rituals to build cohesion. The vertical, over‑the‑head slap that characterized the Baker–Burke moment began to be seen in college and professional arenas, often without explicit mention of where it came from.
Television coverage in the late 1970s and early 1980s amplified the gesture, making it familiar to viewers across the United States. Children imitated what they saw athletes do; the high five migrated from stadiums to playgrounds, schools and workplaces.
3.Glenn Burke’s style and context
Glenn Burke was notable not just for the high five but for his overall style of play and interaction. Teammates and reporters described him as exuberant, generous and physically expressive, using touch and gesture to build camaraderie. As a gay Black man in a homophobic and racially stratified sport, he faced pressures to mute his personality; his visible joy and affectionate greeting rituals resisted that expectation.
Later accounts of Burke’s life, including interviews with Baker and other Dodgers, portray the high five as one expression of this broader ethos. It allowed players to affirm each other publicly, in a brief, nonverbal way that cameras could capture and fans could join.
The queer dimension of Burke’s presence—his relationships and the hostility he encountered—has often been separated from discussions of the high five, as though the gesture floated free of its maker’s identity. The archive insists that his whole personhood, including his sexuality, is part of the story of how and why the gesture took shape.
4.Competing origin stories and misattribution
Over time, alternative origin stories have emerged. Some credit a University of Louisville men’s basketball player with inventing the high five in 1978; others point to early volleyball teams or to generic ‘sports celebrations’ evolving over time without a single inventor.
These accounts often rely on later recollections and lack the combination of precise date, public stage and multiple eyewitnesses that anchor the Baker–Burke event. More importantly, they reflect a broader tendency to treat cultural innovations as diffuse, arising from unnamed ‘culture’ rather than from specific people—especially when those people are Black and, in Burke’s case, queer.
The archive does not deny that hand‑slapping gestures existed before 1977 in Black communities and other spaces. Low fives, handshakes and celebratory slaps were common. What it holds as authorship is the codification of the vertical, above‑the‑head high five as a repeatable, named gesture in a major cultural arena, and the documented role of Baker and Burke in that codification.
5.Erasure and the archive’s stance
Standard popular histories of the high five often mention the Dodgers story as one among several possibilities or omit it entirely, attributing the gesture to a vague ‘rise of sports celebration’ or to later college athletes. This flattening erases the specificity of the Black baseball context and the individuals involved.
The record of Baker and Burke’s role survives in sports journalism, player memoirs and oral histories, many of them housed in team archives and Black press collections. These sources are sometimes treated as less authoritative than generalized cultural histories, even though they offer direct testimony from participants.
The archive applies its presumption of authorship: where Black labor and creativity produced a widely used cultural form, and where there is concrete evidence of that production, the burden lies on those who would locate authorship elsewhere. In the case of the high five, no competing origin story offers stronger evidence than the Dodger Stadium moment.
For that reason, the archive names the high five as a Black-authored gesture, born of the specific relationship between Dusty Baker and Glenn Burke. At the same time, it holds open the possibility that similar hand gestures arose independently in other settings. What is not open is the question of whether Black inventors belong in the story—they do, and they are named here.
The archive holds the high five as a specific cultural invention authored in Black baseball, not as an anonymous product of ‘sports culture’. The Dusty Baker–Glenn Burke moment is both documented and emblematic: two Black players making joy visible and reproducible in a stadium that had rarely seen them framed as creative originators. By naming them, the archive restores credit to a gesture that became so ubiquitous its source was treated as unimportant. The high five’s spread demonstrates how Black performers build the shared repertoire of modern life—from greetings to celebrations—while official histories tend to treat their contributions as background noise rather than authorship. The archive also recognizes Glenn Burke’s role as a gay Black man whose embodiment of the gesture carried meanings of community and defiance that standard sports histories have been slow to admit. His authorship matters both for the gesture itself and for what it says about who gets to be remembered as a maker of culture.
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.