By Kathy Wray Coleman, Editor

CLEVELAND, Ohio-President Barack Obama (pictured first) will visit the recreation center at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland at E. 38th St and Community College Ave. in the early afternoon on Thurs., Obama for America campaign officials announced Sun.

The campaign event is free and open to the public.

Tickets are needed to attend and can be picked up one-person-a-ticket- beginning at  5 p.m. on Mon at the Tri-C recreation center; Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Headquarters, 1466 St. Clair Ave., Cleveland; and campaign offices at 13100 Shaker Square in Cleveland and 5734 Ridge Road in Parma.

Meanwhile, African-American Cleveland area Black elected officials and other Black leaders for Obama will meet Mon. from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Woodlawn Academy in Cleveland, 2950 Martin Luther King Drive, for a campaign strategy session that is open to the public, said Blaine Griffin, vice president of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party and the director of the community relations board for the City of Cleveland.

For more information on that public meeting contact Obama for America African-American Vote Director Ashley Allison at 614-286-9486 or Obama for America Shaker Square campaign headquarters in Cleveland at 216- 416-2017.

The telephone number to the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party offices in Cleveland is 216-621-9750.

Griffin said that the meeting is also an opportunity for Black people to give input relative to the Obama campaign.

The president is in a neck and neck race with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, and Ohio remains a battleground state.

Obama, America's first Black president, comes to town at a time when Black leaders are calling on him to embrace them more firmly into his campaign, about 50 of them even meeting just last week with Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who supports Romney, and at the urging of George Forbes (pictured third), the former president of the Cleveland NAACP and longtime general counsel for the Call and Post Newspaper, Ohio's Black press.

Whether the president's upcoming visit to Cleveland was planned before Gov. Kasich began meeting with Black leaders as a group last week in Cleveland has not been announced publicly, though an Obama campaign official said under condition of anonymity that it had been planned long ago and that Forbes is insignificant.

Reach Cleveland Urban News. Com by email at editor@clevelandurbannews.com and by telephone at 216-932-3114.