Adrienne Cannon

Adrienne Cannon has served as the Afro-American history and culture specialist for the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress since 1996. She has the primary curatorial and acquisition responsibilities for the division’s African American collections and provides reference service to researchers.

Cannon oversees the NAACP Records, the largest single collection ever acquired by the Library and annually the most heavily used. She is the curator of the recent exhibition “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words.” She was the lead curator of the 2014 exhibition “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom,” curator of the 2010 online special presentation “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom,” and co-curator with Daun van Ee of the 2004 exhibition “‘With an Even Hand:’ Brown v. Board at Fifty.”

In 2019, she received the Marjorie and James Billington Staff Recognition Award “for outstanding contributions and distinguished service in building, sustaining, and providing access to the collections of the Library of Congress.” Prior to joining the Library, Cannon was an associate curator for the University of Virginia’s Special Collections Department and a photographic archivist for the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and Brown University.