# High Five (gesture) *The archive holds the modern high five as a Black-authored celebratory gesture, crystallized in 1977 by Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker and carried into global popular culture through Black sport and media.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: The Culture · Status: In review · Revised: July 23, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/high-five-gesture ## Questions this record answers - Who really invented the high five? - How did a Black baseball player turn the high five into a global celebration? - What role did Glenn Burke play in the history of sports celebrations? - How did Black athletes shape modern fan rituals in American sports? ## Summary The archive holds the modern high five as a Black-authored gesture, first crystallized as a named, repeatable celebration between Los Angeles Dodgers outfielders Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker on October 2, 1977. From that moment on the Dodger Stadium grass, a simple raised-hand slap traveled out through Black sport, Black media, and Black nightlife, becoming one of the most recognizable signs of joy and solidarity in the world. Burke, a charismatic Black outfielder, lifted his hand as Baker rounded third after hitting his 30th home run, and Baker, not knowing what else to do, slapped it; teammates, fans, and then children in the stands began copying the move, turning a single Black improvisation into a new standard for celebration. Within a few years the high five had moved from Major League dugouts into Black basketball courts, playground games, television comedies, and music videos, carried disproportionately by Black athletes and performers who treated it as part of a broader grammar of exuberant, defiant public joy. The archive reads the high five not as a trivial fad but as a piece of Black authorship in how bodies express triumph under public scrutiny, a small act of co-authorship in the language of modern sport that pushed against both the color line and the unwritten rules that policed how Black athletes were allowed to celebrate. ## The archive's standing The high five sits in the archive as a canonical example of how Black creativity in sport quietly remade global everyday ritual. It is a simple gesture, but it announced a new kind of public celebration at a time when Black athletes were expected to keep their joy contained. The archive holds Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker as the authors who gave the gesture its name, its first famous instantiation, and its path into mass culture, even where reference works still treat its origin as anonymous trivia. The high five’s stature lies in how completely it entered ordinary life while leaving its Black makers largely unnamed; correcting that erasure is part of restoring the record of Black authorship in the culture of play and triumph. ## Origins on the Dodgers’ outfield grass In the last game of the 1977 regular season, Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run, completing a historic quartet: he was the fourth Dodger to reach 30 homers that year. As Baker rounded third and headed home, Glenn Burke, the team’s young Black center fielder, lifted his hand high over his head; Baker, seeing the raised palm and drawn by the moment, slapped it as he crossed the plate. That improvised contact — hand to hand, above the shoulder — was immediately recognized by teammates and fans as something new. Burke and Baker repeated the move in the dugout and in games that followed, teaching teammates what they called a “high five” and encouraging fans to copy the gesture. Local Black press in Los Angeles and later national features traced the move back to Burke, whose flair and willingness to play with the boundaries of acceptable celebration marked him within the clubhouse and the stands. Early accounts in club publications and fan memory consistently name Burke as the originator and Baker as his first partner, establishing authorship in testimony long before later reference works flattened the gesture into anonymous folklore. ## Diffusion through Black sport and media From the Dodgers, the high five spread quickly across professional and collegiate sports. Black basketball players, already steeped in a culture of handshakes, daps, and celebratory contact, adopted the overhead slap as part of their repertoire on courts and playgrounds. Televised games in the late 1970s and early 1980s carried images of Black athletes exchanging high fives after dunks, blocks, and clutch plays, embedding the gesture in a mass viewing audience. At the same time, Black performers on variety shows, sitcoms, and in music videos began to use the high five as shorthand for camaraderie and success, often in explicitly Black spaces. The gesture’s spread followed the path of Black-controlled style: from locker rooms to street games, from Black youth culture to mainstream advertising. An idea born in a moment between two Black players under the camera lights became a standard greeting between children, co-workers, and strangers, a sign of mutual triumph that required no shared language. ## Glenn Burke’s authorship and the politics of celebration Glenn Burke’s role in the origin story of the high five sits at the intersection of sport, sexuality, and race. Burke, widely understood in later testimony to have been gay, navigated a hostile environment in Major League Baseball where Blackness and queerness both drew scrutiny. His exuberant celebrations — including the high five — were read by some club officials as signs of nonconformity, and his career was cut short far earlier than his talent warranted. Black newspapers and oral histories with teammates preserved the memory of Burke’s invention even as official record books focused on statistics rather than the culture of play. The archive admits those testimonies on their own standing: former players recalling Burke teaching them the high five in the clubhouse; fans remembering the first times they saw the new gesture at Dodger Stadium; later profiles by Black journalists linking Burke’s creativity to a broader tradition of Black expressive resistance in sport. The archive holds that the effort to marginalize Burke’s person cannot be allowed to erase his authorship. The way celebrations are policed in sport — fines for “excessive celebration,” discipline for displays deemed too flamboyant — has always fallen hardest on Black athletes. In that context, a new, joy-forward gesture created by a Black player has political weight: it carved out space for exuberance in a game that tried to keep Black bodies disciplined and subdued. ## Everyday ritual and the erasure of origin By the late 1980s, the high five had become ubiquitous across American life and then abroad. Children learned it in schoolyards; service workers exchanged high fives at closing time; television game shows used it to mark contestant victories. The gesture passed into a realm where few people stopped to ask where it came from. In popular reference works, the high five appears either with no origin story or with vague language about “likely” beginnings among sports teams, missing the specific Black authorship carried in player testimony and early reporting. The archive names that erasure as part of a wider pattern: everyday elements of global culture that began in Black communities are treated as anonymous or naturally occurring, while white-origin practices are carefully credited. The high five now belongs to everyone who uses it, but that universality was made possible by Black athletes and Black media channels that turned a private joke into a public ritual. The archive restores Burke and Baker to their place in the story, holding the high five as a case study in how Black creativity reshapes daily life and how quickly that authorship can be stripped in the mainstream telling. ## The gesture’s place in the grammar of Black joy Finally, the archive places the high five within a lineage of Black-authored gestures: the dap among Black soldiers in Vietnam, complex handshake routines in Black fraternities and neighborhood crews, choreographed team celebrations in Black-dominated sports. Each arose as a way to mark solidarity and survival in systems designed to constrain Black bodies. The high five stands out for its simplicity and its success in crossing into the general culture while retaining its original meaning of shared triumph. In that grammar of Black joy, the high five is a bridge between worlds: a gesture born in a specific moment on a Los Angeles baseball diamond that now connects strangers in airports, office corridors, and playgrounds. The archive holds that its origin in Black sport is not incidental but central: it shows again that Black people are not merely participants in popular culture but its authors, even where the record has been slow to admit their names. ## Sources 1. Jon Mooallem, "The High Five," ESPN The Magazine, October 2011. 2. Brian Helgeland (writer) and Michael Collins (producer), "Out: The Glenn Burke Story" (documentary film), PBS, 2010. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/end-zone-celebration - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/sports-celebration-american-football - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-athletes-in-major-league-baseball - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/catchphrase - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/side-eye --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "High Five (gesture)," revised July 23, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/high-five-gesture Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.