High Five (gesture)

The high five was carried into American popular consciousness by Black athletes and Black fans who used an open-handed, overhead slap to mark achievement and solidarity in the stadiums and locker rooms of the 1970s. The most widely documented early moment is the 1977–1978 Los Angeles Dodgers outfield celebration between Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker, but the gesture sat within a broader Black athletic and street tradition of emphatic, elevated hand contact. As sports media amplified this form of celebration, the high five quickly migrated from baseball diamonds and basketball courts into schoolyards, workplaces and television, where it was stripped of the Black authorship and context that first gave it meaning.

1.Black Athletic Gesture Before the Name

Black athletes and Black urban communities had developed a wide repertoire of celebratory hand gestures before the term “high five” entered print. Slapping palms, raising hands overhead, and using rhythmic, syncopated claps and slaps to mark success were common in Black playground basketball, pickup football and street games in the 1960s and 1970s.

In these spaces, touch and rhythm were central. A raised-hand slap after a made basket or a big play did more than celebrate; it confirmed belonging and mutual recognition. The act of reaching up, meeting another’s palm and releasing carried a sense of elevation and collective triumph that fit Black expressive traditions shaped by church call-and-response, drum-centered social dances and the history of using the body itself as an instrument.

These gestures circulated through Black high schools, HBCU campuses and city playgrounds, largely undocumented in formal archives but present in oral histories, yearbook photographs and local Black press sports pages that describe new ways of “slapping hands” after big plays. The term “high five” would emerge only once sports media began to notice and narrate the movement.

2.Glenn Burke, Dusty Baker and the Televised Moment

On October 2, 1977, at Dodger Stadium, outfielder Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the season, completing a rare quartet of 30-home-run hitters for the Los Angeles Dodgers. As Baker crossed home plate, teammate Glenn Burke, a Black outfielder known for his exuberant personality, raised his hand high above his head. Baker responded by slapping Burke’s palm in midair—an act later recognized as one of the first widely televised high fives.

Burke continued using the gesture in the clubhouse and on the field, encouraging teammates and even fans to join. Teammates and local reporters recalled that Burke treated the high five as a signature, teaching its form and insisting on its height and clarity. Baker and Burke’s interaction, captured by cameras and described in later interviews, became a reference point for histories of the high five.

Yet even this origin story is incomplete without context. Burke had grown up in Oakland, California, moving through Black playground and street-ball culture where celebratory slaps and raised-hand contact were common. When he raised his hand to Baker, he was not inventing from nothing but elevating a familiar Black gesture into a specific, photogenic form at a moment when baseball’s visibility could carry it nationwide.

3.Diffusion Across Sports and Media

Following the Dodgers’ 1977–1978 seasons, the high five spread rapidly across American sports. Basketball players, particularly in the NBA and on college teams with significant Black rosters, used high fives along with chest bumps and more complex handshakes to mark made shots, dunks and defensive stops. Football players adapted the high five to helmeted contexts, sometimes combining it with forearm slaps.

Television coverage of games showed these celebrations repeatedly, and sports commentators began using the phrase “high five,” cementing the gesture’s name. Children watching games mimicked what they saw, and coaches at youth leagues adopted the gesture as a simple way to reward players.

Outside of sport, sitcoms, commercials and movies used high fives as shorthand for friendship and success. Workplaces and schools followed, until the gesture became a default positive response to achievement. In the process, the specifically Black origins and the role of Black athletes in standardizing and popularizing the move were generally omitted, and the high five was described as a “universal” or “spontaneous” invention.

4.Erasure, Contestation and Evidence

Mainstream accounts of the high five’s origin often center the Dodgers moment but treat it as an isolated flash of creativity, disconnected from Burke’s Black Oakland upbringing and from the broader Black athletic culture that had shaped his sensibilities. Other pieces speculate about alternative origins in white college environments or military units, reflecting a search for non-Black sources.

By contrast, oral histories collected from Burke’s teammates and friends, along with interviews with Dusty Baker, emphasize Burke’s role as the initiator of the specific gesture and highlight how quickly it entered team culture. Black sports journalists and later LGBTQ+ writers, documenting Burke’s life as a Black gay man in baseball, have pointed out that his creation of the high five is another example of Black innovation taken up and generalized without sustained credit.

The archive does not claim that Burke alone invented all forms of raised-hand celebration, nor that no similar gestures existed elsewhere. It holds that the high five as a named, widely recognized gesture of American celebration was carried into prominence by Black athletes drawing on Black community practices, and that the absence of Black context in many popular histories is itself a sign of erasure.

5.The High Five’s Place in Black Sporting Language

Within Black sport, the high five is part of a continuum that includes complex handshake rituals, choreographed group celebrations and end-zone dances. These practices share an emphasis on rhythm, synchronization and shared authorship: they turn individual achievement into a collective performance.

League rules and media narratives have often policed such expressions, framing them as excessive or unsportsmanlike when led by Black players, even as the basic high five has been universally accepted. This split reveals how the simplest form of Black celebratory gesture was absorbed and neutralized while richer, more explicitly Black forms were constrained.

The archive places the high five alongside the end-zone celebration, the team handshake line and the sideline dance as part of a Black-authored vocabulary of visible solidarity. Recognizing its origin clarifies that even the most ordinary gestures at a Little League game or office party have histories rooted in particular bodies and communities, and that Black athletes did the work of making them normal.

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.

6.References