May 21 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on May 21

• The Notorious B.I.G. (1972)

  American rapper (Christopher Wallace) widely regarded as one of the most influential hip-hop artists of the 1990s.

• Mr. T (1952)

  American actor and former bodyguard known for playing B.A. Baracus on The A-Team.

• Al Franken (1951)

  American comedian and former U.S. Senator, formerly a Saturday Night Live writer and performer.

This Day in History

• 1881 — Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.

• 1927 — Charles Lindbergh landed near Paris, completing the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight after roughly 33.5 hours in the air.

• 1932 — Amelia Earhart landed in Northern Ireland, completing the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman.

• 1980 — The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters, the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy.

• 1856 — Pro-slavery forces sacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, one of the defining episodes of the violent 'Bleeding Kansas' conflict that preceded the Civil War.

What May 21 Says About You

May 21 opens Gemini on this site's calendar, and the date's history offers an unusually clean set of landings after the previous day's departures — Lindbergh touched down near Paris on this date in 1927, completing the first solo transatlantic flight after roughly 33 and a half hours alone in the cockpit, and Amelia Earhart landed in Northern Ireland on the same date five years later in 1932, closing out her own record-setting crossing. Arriving is the theme, appropriately, for the first day of an air-sign stretch known for movement and communication rather than the grounded steadiness of the Taurus days just before it. Clara Barton's founding of the American Red Cross on this date in 1881 fits that same register — an organization built explicitly around rapid movement and communication in moments of crisis, connecting resources to need as quickly as possible. The Notorious B.I.G., born May 21, 1972, built a rap career defined by rapid, dense wordplay and storytelling delivered with startling fluency, a genuinely Gemini set of strengths even though the astrological framing wasn't something he'd have used to describe his own style. Mr. T, born twenty years earlier on the same date in 1952, built an entire public persona out of a highly communicative, instantly readable catchphrase-driven style — his I pity the fool line became shorthand recognizable even to people who'd never watched an episode of The A-Team. The numerology day number for the 21st reduces to 3, tied to communication and expression, a fitting pairing for a date whose most famous births made their names through voice and delivery as much as substance. Al Franken took that same instinct in a different direction, moving from comedy writing into an actual Senate seat, using persuasion and public communication as his literal profession for over a decade. The Empire Strikes Back's 1980 release, on this date, is remembered as the moment a franchise built on straightforward heroics got noticeably more complicated and morally ambiguous — arguably a very Gemini turn for a story to take, trading simple certainty for something more layered. May's emerald and lily of the valley continue as the month's shared symbols regardless of the sign shift, a reminder that the calendar's zodiac boundary doesn't reset the seasonal facts underneath it. Not every entry on this date is about arrival or wordplay, though: the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas on this date in 1856, when a pro-slavery posse destroyed printing presses, torched buildings, and looted the free-state stronghold, was itself an attack aimed squarely at silencing the town's abolitionist newspapers — a violent attempt to control who got to communicate and be heard, in a much darker register than anything else tied to this Gemini date. Clara Barton had already spent years nursing wounded soldiers on Civil War battlefields, earning the nickname "Angel of the Battlefield," before she formalized that instinct into the American Red Cross on this date. The Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 debut album, Ready to Die, is still regularly ranked among the greatest hip-hop albums ever recorded, though he lived to release only one further album before his death in 1997.