Sometime, somehow, jamming the fleshy side of one’s fists together with outward facing thumbs became a ubiquitous hand gesture in Durham, N.C. Like a peace sign. Or flipping the bird.
This symbol, often known as the “Bull City hands,” decorates restaurants, t-shirts and — back in 2024 — a billboard. An homage to the city’s minor league baseball team, the Durham Bulls, the hand sign roughly replicates the bovine’s silhouette.
But when and where did this symbol emerge? Though its meaning is understood citywide, the origin is murky. So I went on a hunt into its history. As with all good Bull City inquiries, I started on the city’s subreddit.
I found two relevant threads: The first, posted five years ago by woodsman6366, asked my exact question. The second lambasted Duke Athletics in a post titled “shameless appropriation?” The outrage was prompted by a billboard featuring the university’s Blue Devil mascot making the hand gesture, captioned “Put up your Dukes.”
Duke football has increasingly incorporated the symbol into its advertising. An Aug. 4, 2024 press release announced the athletics department would “implement a secondary logo honoring Durham.” According to the release, “the hands symbolize a ritualistic motion that has become a staple for Duke student-athletes and fans when celebrating big moments on the field of play.”
Several Duke Football Instagram posts feature photos showing just that: uniformed players and newly-signed recruits mashing their fists together with “horns” out. But Reddit users debated whether Duke’s embrace was in the spirit of representation or co-optation. The billboard, in particular, sparked a Change.org petition arguing the gesture belongs to Bull City.
Last September, Duke University filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the artwork on the billboard. Specifically, “the mark consists of an image of a devil face wearing a headband featuring the terms “BULL CITY.” Below the devil face are two hands with outward pointing thumbs,” the patent says. The request was approved — or, “published for opposition” — on March 17. (That gives third parties 30 days to object if they believe they will be harmed by the trademark.)
Duke Athletics did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the campaign and or any research that went into the gesture’s origins.
Back on Reddit, comments offered many theories. Some Durhamites cited the rap duo Language Arts’ and their early-2000s track “Bulls Up.” The pair — Aden Darity and Pierce Freelon — didn’t invent the gesture, but they helped amplify it.
Freelon is a Grammy-nominated children’s musician, the founder of Blackspace, a digital makerspace for Durham youth of color, and a former lecturer in music and African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is from a prominent Durham family (his mother Nnenna is a famous jazz singer; his late father Phil was a well-known architect), but Freelon is known for his own accomplishments.
“I think we wrote the song in 2002 and recorded it a few years later. We shot a video in 2004 and performed it all over the state over the next 4-5 years. We definitely helped popularize the gesture – but as you can see in the video, there are candid/unscripted scenes of us driving around Durham throwing our “Bulls” up to people across the city – they were throwing it back!” Freelon said in an email.
Sure enough, in the “Bulls Up” video, that exchange is visible. As the pair rap under the East Campus bridge and drive past North Carolina Central University, quick cuts show people across Durham flashing the gesture back at them. “So it was definitely in the ethers before we wrote a song about it. But the song, the merch, the video and the performances definitely helped proliferate it!” Freelon continued.
Many of those scenes were filmed along Lakewood Avenue and Fayetteville Street, near the historic Hayti neighborhood, a center of Black life and culture in Durham.
“I said put your right fist to your left fist,” Freelon spits. “And stick your thumbs up, so I can see ‘em. No doubt!”
Still, Freelon couldn’t point to a moment when he first learned the gesture.
“There are certain things that you learn growing up, like how to dap someone up,” he told me. “So I don’t have a specific memory, but it was definitely something that came from the Black community.”
Other Durhamites trace their first memory of the gesture to the 2010s. Jacob Streilein and Chris Alston, then students at Riverside High School, used it in a T-shirt design for their prom.
“They wanted those hands with ‘PROM 2010’ across the knuckles,” Streilein said. “It ended up being popular enough that we made a plain ‘BULL CITY’ version to sell on our own after.”
By then, the gesture was already recognizable enough to sell. What’s clear is that Duke didn’t create it. When I mentioned the trademark filing, Freelon was surprised.
“My question would be: protected from what?” he said. “It’s something that predated Duke’s adoption.”
He paused, then reached for a comparison.“The first thought that comes to mind is Elvis, right? You have this Black cultural expression that is kind of co-opted and repackaged in a context that’s not quite connected to the original source.”
Optimistic about potential archives, I turned to institutions: the Durham History Museum, Duke University Libraries and the Durham County Library. Each email yielded similar dead ends — and a U-turn back to the Reddit threads.
I popped into the Discover Durham office to see if anyone there had an idea. In January, the marketing agency announced its Love Durham campaign, meant to spur foot-traffic for small businesses. The logo, a doodle of hands forming a heart and the Bull City gesture, appears on stickers and buildings throughout Durham.
“Durham residents are fiercely proud of their community and the Bull City hands have become a symbol of that shared pride. For the Love Durham campaign, we chose to build around that existing symbol rather than create something new,” said Cara Rousseau, Discover Durham’s Chief Marketing Officer.
But, again, although it was a no-brainer to incorporate the iconography, Discover Durham wasn’t aware of its origins. I ventured to the North Carolina Collection at the downtown library, hoping to find photo evidence for myself. Durham County school yearbooks are considered rare. Meaning, the librarians asked me to leave my ID with them, I had to lock my belongings away before I could pore through one edition at a time
I started with Streilein’s alma mater, which he attended from 2006 to 2010. I caught one or two students making the sign in the shadows of a group photo, but more interesting was the class of 2008’s favorite artists: Lil Wayne, T.I., Jay-Z and Three 6 Mafia. For the 2009 and 2010 volumes, the prom spreads were sparse, and I couldn’t find his t-shirts anywhere. By the 2012 edition, a picture of student Hunter Moste doing the Bull City hands while snorkeling occupies significant real estate on page 22.
Hopeful to pin the hand gesture to the 20th century, I checked out Hillside High School yearbooks from 1991, 1995 and 2000.
Hillside felt like a logical place to look. One of Durham’s oldest high schools, it has long been a pillar of the Hayti District. (The school’s current campus on Fayetteville Street was designed by Phil Freelon.)
Squinting at photos of pep rallies, team pictures and spirit days, there only seemed to be a handful of peace signs.
But throughout my search, there wasn’t a single person who needed an explanation of the Bull City hands. Everyone knew the gesture.
And maybe that’s the closest thing to an answer. There isn’t one definitive inventor because the hand sign was never meant to be “owned.”
“We love Durham” Freelon said. “Throw the bulls up is a sign of pride and is a sign of our own unique culture.”
Photo at top: Duke University uses Bull City hands in its marketing and has sought trademark protection for the use.
Gabrielle Lazor
