‘I’m Afraid That When the Devil Come Take My Master’s Body, the Devil May Mistake and Get Mine:’ Necro-Armor and African American Death Ideology

The 1701 Establishment of Religious Worship Act in colonial Maryland explicitly excluded ‘negros and malattoes’ from formal documentation. Marking a turning point in the legal construction of racialized burial borders, race was used to construct a rigid border privileging whites with burial rights while systematically denying them to Black peoples. This essay interrogates this border arguing that while they were originally erected to extend the racial hierarchies of life into death, African Americans redefined their meaning through acts of resistance. Positioned as a microhistory, this essay focuses intensively on African American burial practices and the legal, racial, and spiritual borders that shaped them in colonial Maryland. This study zooms in on the 1701 Establishment of Religious Worship Act and a particular community’s response: the construction of autonomous burial space and declaration of burial rights. Drawing from slave narratives, the essay introduces the concept of necro-armor. Necro-armor is the author’s term for how African Americans redefined spatial boundaries, not just for protection but also defiance, culminating in the 1807 creation of the African Burying Ground as a symbol of Black self-determination and sovereignty. In doing so, the deeper question of who upheld the border is considered.