Goodbye to a Brickyard Preacher
Longtime combative evangelist Rev. Gary Birdsong, who died in February, was as much a Campus Character and fixture on NC State’s bricks as the Strolling Professor in front of Gardner Arboretum.
By now, Rev. Gary Birdsong has found his answers.
For more than half a century, at NC State and other colleges across the nation, Birdsong was an evangelical arbiter of damnation, righteousness and repentance for unsuspecting college students and an argumentative punching bag for faculty.
A native of Halifax County and a longtime post office boxholder in Knightdale, Birdsong was a regular ranter and rager at NC State’s University Plaza, UNC-Chapel Hill’s The Pit, Appalachian State’s Sanford Mall and UNC Charlotte’s New Quad, among other student-gathering places. They were manageable drives on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, back before he settled down in Wake County.
His words — shouts that had faded to whispers in recent years — are gone now: Birdsong died peacefully at home on Feb. 27. He was 81.
Though he was the very definition of a Campus Character, Birdsong was not necessarily unique among the itinerant evangelists who traveled the beaten paths between UNC System schools and beyond, calling out sin and societal degradation to students rushing to eat sandwiches and potato chips between classes.
He was local, though, so generations of NC State students encountered him at either end of the Free Expression Tunnel as he turned bricks into brimstone.
Birdsong was the Brickyard Preacher of record, damning mostly freshmen and sophomores to hell for their sexuality, their promiscuity and their overtly “sinful” lifestyles. He also promised the glory of God if they made good choices — as defined by his ultraconservative view of biblical teachings. Upperclassmen knew ways to avoid him.
Combative, verbally abusive and always animated, he, his bullhorn and his verse-decorated placards began appearing at local universities around 1980 — not long, Birdsong claimed, after he and his beloved Harley left a chapter of the Hells Angels biker gang.
He was a cotton-mouthed Cotton Mather who had a questioning audience ready-made for his confrontational evangelism, which featured signs that warned “It’s Your Choice: Heaven or Hell.”
Sometimes, he brought students to tears. Sometimes, he brought them to fisticuffs. Multiple times, NC State and other schools brought him to court, for such things as assault and gathering on school grounds without a permit. He was mostly released on his own repentance.
“I get arrested sometimes [at colleges],” Birdsong once told the News & Observer of Raleigh. “They hate God.”
(That thought might be contested at a meeting at any of more than 50 faith-based organizations on campus, but not necessarily from Birdsong’s viewpoint.)
He was once banned for two years from The Pit at UNC after being trespassed from that area, so he spent that time preaching in an adjacent green space.
His religious performance art certainly was not for everyone. He absorbed the charges of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and general prickliness every time he appeared in public.
Birdsong claimed that his style made students think, and that they became clear-minded when they argued in anger, in the style of longtime political science professor Abraham Holtzman. Students generally had no idea that he thought he was conducting a social science experiment, especially when he gesticulated a little too close for comfort. It made him a frequent subject of newspaper editorials and television news stories.
He had enormous engagement rates for his radical “social media,” long before Facebook, X or Instagram were invented. Birdsong was well-known throughout the country. He even had his own Wikipedia entry.
Others have since picked up his evangelical shawl. There is still a regular rotation of preachers who appear on warm autumn afternoons and sunny spring days, as well as a group of street preachers who take turns proselytizing outside the gates of Carter-Finley Stadium for every home football game.
Birdsong, a well-known character around campus, left the longest impression.
In Campus Characters, we explore some of the people who, through the years, have given NC State’s campus a different spice and flair. If you’d like to suggest someone to profile, email Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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