High Five (gesture)

The modern high five gesture in sport — two people raising a single hand each and slapping palms in celebration — was crystallized in late-1970s American stadiums by Black athletes, most famously Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke and his teammate Dusty Baker at Dodger Stadium in 1977, and Louisville Cardinals basketball players including Derek Smith and Wiley Brown that same era. Within a few years, the move traveled across leagues, playgrounds, and television, becoming a universal symbol of joy and triumph while the Black hands that defined it were largely forgotten in mainstream retellings. Long before cameras captured that Dodger Stadium moment, Black communities across the United States had developed a rich vocabulary of handshakes, slaps, and greeting rituals that blended African-derived call-and-response with contemporary style — from elaborate soul handshakes to shoulder slaps and “give me some skin.” The high five emerges within that continuum as a precise, visually striking form that fit neatly into the rectangular frame of televised sports and the rhythm of a fast-paced game. ## The Dodger Stadium moment On October 2, 1977, during the final game of the regular season, Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run for the Dodgers, making the team the first in Major League Baseball history with four players each hitting 30 homers. As Baker rounded home, Glenn Burke, waiting on deck, raised his hand high in the air; Baker, unsure how to respond, slapped it, creating what players and fans soon recognized as a new kind of celebration. Teammates recall Burke deploying the gesture with flair in the dugout and clubhouse, turning it into a recurring ritual that marked homers, big plays, and good news. Burke then carried the move into everyday life, high-fiving children around Los Angeles and in his Bay Area hometown, seeding the gesture beyond the ballpark. Contemporary press coverage focused on the team accomplishment, not the creation of the gesture, but later interviews and documentaries re-centered Burke as an inventor whose creativity had been hiding in plain sight. ## Louisville, basketball, and parallel invention Around the same period, players on the University of Louisville men’s basketball team, including Derek Smith and Wiley Brown, were also captured on film executing an overhead palm slap to celebrate plays, which some have remembered as the origin of the term “high five” in their circle. In this account, again, Black athletes in a majority-Black sport refined existing celebratory habits into a repeatable, named move, which spread quickly through college hoops and into pickup games nationwide. Rather than competing, these origin stories point to a shared cultural ground: Black athletes in different sports, drawing on similar repertoires of hand-based greetings, independently converged on a particular shape and height of celebratory slap that television could easily showcase. The archive reads these as parallel Black authorship of a gesture whose deeper roots in Black social practice go back decades. ## From Black ballparks to generic symbol By the early 1980s, the high five had become a pop-cultural staple. Children’s television, sitcoms, commercials, and corporate advertising all embraced the move as a family-friendly emblem of success, often featuring white actors and athletes, or animated characters, offering no hint of its Black sporting origins. As the gesture traveled, it shed context: the names Glenn Burke, Dusty Baker, Derek Smith, and others rarely appeared in discussions of where the high five came from. Burke’s own story — a talented Black center fielder whose Major League career was cut short amid racism and hostility to his sexuality, and who later died of AIDS-related illness — underscores how structural bias can separate a widely used cultural object from its Black creator. His teammates have testified that Burke "invented the high five" and that they saw it first from him, but this oral record lived primarily in interviews, community memory, and Black press features, not in the early official histories of the game. ## Gesture, authorship, and erasure The high five’s path from Black athlete innovation to anonymous global symbol follows a pattern seen in music, dance, and slang: Black creativity generates a form; mass media amplifies it; marketing detaches it from its makers and repackages it as a universal gesture. Unlike a patented device, a bodily move leaves no formal registration, so authorship is preserved mainly in testimony and video, which were long treated as anecdotal rather than archival. Reclaiming the high five’s Black sporting origins does not narrow its meaning; it restores the line of authorship and honors the imagination that turned everyday handshakes into a defining emblem of shared victory. The archive holds the high five as a case study in how Black style becomes world language — and how naming the authors is itself an act of respect and repair.

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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