CLEVELAND, Ohio-The First Presidential Debate between President Donald Trump, a Republican, and Democratic nominee Joe Biden (both pictured) will be held on Sept. 29 in the largely Black city of Cleveland, and on the Health Education campus of Case Western Reserve University, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Monday.

Cleveland Clinic, just named the second best hospital in the world in U.S. News rankings, will co-host the event with CWRU, a private and prominent research university created in 1967.

The University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind. had originally agreed to be the host but pulled out amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Led by four term mayor Frank Jackson, the city's third Black mayor, Cleveland is a major American city, and a Democratic stronghold that sits in Cuyahoga County, also a Democratic stronghold, and the second largest  of 88 counties in Ohio, a pivotal state for presidential elections.

Cleveland became the first major city to elect an African-American mayor when voters elected the late Carl B Stokes to the post in 1967, Stokes the brother and only sibling of the late Louis Stokes, the first Black congressman from Ohio.

A former longtime U.S. senator, Biden served as vice president under former president Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, from 2009 to 2017, the year Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality television host who won over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, took over as president.