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Negro League player encourages Choffin students
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Choffin Career and Technical Center seniors, above from left, Delana Robinson and Charisse Brown, listen to the Black History program Wednesday at the school. W. James Cobbin, right, was the featured speaker. Cobbin, a city resident, played baseball in the American Negro League in the 1950s.
By Denise Dick
Youngstown
City resident W. James Cobbin is one of about 65 surviving American Negro League baseball players.
The president/CEO of CCS Trans Inc., a Youngstown transportation company, was signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates organization’s minor-league team while playing baseball on scholarship at Allen University in Columbia, S.C.
During spring training, he got an offer from the general manager of the New York Black Yankees of the Negro League, accepted and moved to Tampa, Fla. He played for the New York team and the Indianapolis Clowns from 1956 to 1958.
Cobbin, a 1953 graduate of North High School, spoke Wednesday to students at Choffin Career and Technical Center as part of a Black History Month program.
“The Negro League teams had no baseball fields and no stadium,” Cobbin said.
While at spring training for the Pirates minor-league team, Cobbin and his teammates were to stay in a hotel. Because of segregation, though, white members of the team stayed at the hotel while Cobbin and the only other black man on the team were picked up by a man in a truck who took them to a house in the country where they stayed.
Water for their bathing was heated on a fire outside.
The Negro League produced the likes of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson, the first black player to break the color barrier and play in the white major league.
The league broke up in 1960, and no one thought to preserve the name. That resulted in companies across the globe producing memorabilia bearing the Negro League name and none of the profit going to the players.
Many of the players died not being able to pay for their own funerals, Cobbin said.
Cobbin, who also is the owner of the W.J. Cobbin Office Tower on Fifth Avenue, told students that they have to be committed to what they want to accomplish.
“You have to have an over- whelming passion for what you want to do,” he said.
Natalie Scott, Choffin guidance counselor, and Loisjean Haynes-Paige, business tech prep teacher, said the program, themed “Take Me Back to the Ball Game,” was designed to show students what they can accomplish.