He ended his career in education spending a decade as principal of Merrill High School in Pine Bluff.

Joseph was their eldest son, and he attended schools in Chillicothe where John Mercer Langston was a classmate.

At the age of 15, he moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and taught in schools there as an assistant to Henry Adams, who would become his brother-in-law.

He returned to Louisville where his father's family lived and took work as a clerk, first in a mercantile agency and then in a bank.

[2] At this time, he was a member of the "colored school board committee" with a number of local black leaders, including William Henry Harrison.

There he was appointed chief clerk of the Little Rock Post Office and in 1873 the state superintendent of public schools which he served for two years,[1] defeating Thomas Smith for the position.

[1] He returned to Little Rock in 1875 at the request of Governor Augustus H. Garland and sent to Pine Bluff where he was to establish the Branch Normal College, as nothing had been done since the passing of the law authorizing its creation in 1873.

[6] A year later, in 1893, Corbin was investigated due to rumors of poor performance and was recommended to be fired by the Democratic state legislature.

It has been suggested that the negative report was related to Corbin's support of John M. Clayton in the hard-fought 1888 election campaigns.

[2] He was buried in the German Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, where his wife and son William had previously been interred.

Corbin owned land on the south side of Chicago, and in 1909 he acquired a plot of six graves for $500 at German Waldheim, because it did not have racially restrictive burial covenants.

According to the NRHP registration form, the gravesite was added in part because of the lack of existing historic structures tied to his life and, thus, "there is no other appropriate resource associated with his significance.