Bingham, Rosie Phillips (1949-)

Rosie Phillips Bingham has always been determined as well as a person of vision. It appears that these are values she learned from her parents growing up in poverty on a plantation in Mississippi with 11 siblings. During her childhood, she and one of her brothers contracted typhoid fever and spent nearly a month in the hospital, where her mother stayed with them day and night despite having no accommodations (e.g., bed, chair, cot). Determination propelled her mother to sleep standing up or sitting on one of her children's beds, and undoubtedly Bingham carries the memory of this determination and tenacity with her.

At the age of 4, Bingham and her family moved from Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, where her father became a sanitation worker. He was involved in the 1968 sanitation strike that promoted equal wages and benefits for African American sanitation workers and sparked the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited the city to support these workers and was later assassinated there. Bingham must have also been influenced by her father's determination in seeking racial and economic equality as well as encouraged by her father's optimism that this type of equality was attainable.

Bingham was described as a “smart girl” growing up, and she immensely enjoyed reading books as a child, because books allowed her to escape her poverty. Her vision and imagination allowed her to take herself into another world. Because Bingham's family was poor, it was only through her intelligence and determination that she was able to attend Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois, and receive a bachelor of science degree in sociology and education. Bingham then went on to receive her master of arts degree in counseling and guidance and her doctorate in counseling psychology from Ohio State University.

In 1972, Bingham began her career as a psychologist and relied on the same determination and vision from her parents and from the civil rights movement in order to accomplish her goals and aspirations. First, Bingham became an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio Dominican College in Columbus, Ohio. She worked there for 6 years, focusing on college students' scholastic efficacy, before moving to the University of Florida in 1978. There, Bingham became a staff psychologist, adjunct professor, and finally associate director of the University of Florida Counseling Center. Her peers considered her determined, hardworking, and someone who could always recognize the big picture while also attending to the details. In addition, Bingham was described as always having a vision of how she and the center would accomplish their established goals and as an individual who would somehow find a way to bring this vision to fruition. While maintaining professional boundaries at the University of Florida, Bingham also established [Page 54]lifelong friendships because of her good-natured humor and her ability to balance work with play.

In 1985, Bingham moved to the place she considered home and accepted a position as the director for the Center for Student Development/Counseling Center at the University of Memphis. During this same time, she accepted an appointment as adjunct professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology, and Research at the University of Memphis; this later turned into a full professorship. As the director of the counseling center, she had the vision to establish an internship at the university, and due to her determination and diligence as well as the commitment of others, this internship has been accredited by the Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation (OPCA) of the American Psychological Association since 1988.

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