April 27 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on April 27

• Ulysses S. Grant (1822)

  18th President of the United States and the Union general who led the North to victory in the American Civil War.

• Coretta Scott King (1927)

  American civil rights activist and author who continued and expanded the work of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., after his assassination.

• August Wilson (1945)

  American playwright known for a ten-play cycle chronicling African American life across the 20th century, including Fences and The Piano Lesson.

This Day in History

• 1521 — Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines during his circumnavigation expedition.

• 1865 — The steamboat SS Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee, killing an estimated 1,200 people, most of them recently freed Union prisoners of war — the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history.

• 1994 — South Africa's first multiracial democratic elections concluded their voting period, with results confirming Nelson Mandela's election as president.

What April 27 Says About You

Ulysses S. Grant, born April 27, 1822, led the Union Army to victory in the Civil War before becoming the 18th President of the United States, and it's a strange historical footnote that one of the deadliest disasters connected to that same war — the explosion of the steamboat SS Sultana on the Mississippi River — happened on Grant's own birthday, April 27, 1865, just weeks after the war's end. The Sultana, dangerously overloaded with recently freed Union prisoners of war heading home, exploded near Memphis, killing an estimated 1,200 people in what remains the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history — a catastrophe that has never received anything like the public memory attached to the Titanic, in part because it was overshadowed at the time by news of Lincoln's assassination and John Wilkes Booth's capture in the same week. Coretta Scott King, born on this date in 1927, spent decades after her husband's assassination continuing and formalizing his civil rights legacy, founding the King Center and working to establish the federal holiday now observed in his honor — building lasting institutional structure out of a personal and national tragedy. August Wilson, born in 1945, spent his career writing an ambitious ten-play cycle documenting African American life across every decade of the 20th century, a body of work now considered one of the major achievements of American theater. History reaches back further too: Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed on April 27, 1521, in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines, cutting short the circumnavigation expedition that would nonetheless be completed by his surviving crew, giving Magellan a strange kind of posthumous credit for a journey he didn't personally finish. And South Africa's landmark 1994 elections, which had begun voting on April 26, concluded on April 27, a date now marked in South Africa as Freedom Day. April 27 sits within Taurus, and the sign's association with legacy-building — whether Grant's presidency, King's institutional work, or Wilson's decade-spanning play cycle — runs clearly through this date's birthdays, even as its historical ledger includes one of the most under-remembered disasters in American history. Reduce the day-of-month digits and this date lands on 9, a number traditionally tied to completion and the closing of a cycle, an apt number for both the Sultana disaster's grim postscript to the Civil War and South Africa's own electoral conclusion on this date. Diamond, daisy, sweet pea — April's constants — close a date built around legacies, some celebrated widely and some still working to be properly remembered.