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DETROIT (RNS) — During a town hall meeting last week at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed acknowledged the tensions between the city’s Black residents and its Arab Americans — a tension rooted in economic inequities, race and class.

If elected the first Muslim U.S. senator on Nov. 3, El-Sayed said, he will work to heal the rifts between the two groups.

Then he made his plea: “I also ask that I am judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin,” he said at the Sept. 14 event , echoing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and winning instant applause from some 100 people seated at tables in the church’s fellowship hall.

The church, associated with the Civil Rights Movement and affiliated with the United Church of Christ, is one of several Black congregations El-Sayed has visited.…