High five

[James A. Landau]

I met a man named Joseph Patterson who was on the Washington Redskins in
1969.  This is the information he gave me on the "high five":

First, I was wrong about the Fun Bunch.  They were in the Joe Gibbs era,
early 1980's, not the 1970's as I had thought.  Therefore they were too late to
have introduced the high five to white America, although they may have had at
least a little to do with popularizing it.

Mr. Patterson, who is an African-American born in the late 1940's and raised
in Cleveland, said that as a child in the 1950's he was quite familiar with
the hand-slapping gesture, and that it was then referred to as  "give me five".
The gesture was then normally made at around belt height, not overhead.  To
the best of his knowledge, the term "high five" came into use when the gesture
moved from belt height to overhead.  When whites picked up the high five
gesture, African-Americans responded by introducing the "low five".

        - James A. Landau