Dewhitt L. Bingham, M.S. '87

E. Burton Mercier Alumni Service Award Winner

• Retired clinical assistant professor, Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University; Bloomington

• Major: Criminal Justice Sciences

Dewhitt L. Bingham arrived at Illinois State University for graduate school to study criminal justice after receiving his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Lincoln University. With a master’s degree in his portfolio, Bingham served as a McLean County probation officer for 35 years, a criminal justice adjunct professor at Heartland Community College for 27 years, and Illinois State University Department of Criminal Justice Sciences clinical assistant professor for two years before he retired in 2024.

In 2014, Bingham was named Heartland Community College Adjunct Faculty of the Year. He was one of the first to be promoted to the level of distinguished adjunct professor, and the first adjunct faculty to earn emeritus status.

He is also a three-time published author. He considers Viola Liuzzo: A True Martyr and The Douglass Connection to be his biggest literary contributions. The former is about a Caucasian woman murdered by three members of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King. The latter is about the Douglass Cooperative High School, the Negro school in his hometown, where his grandfather was in the first graduating class of five in 1940, and how Douglass immediately integrated with his alma mater, Festus High School, in 1955, immediately after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.