The Martin Luther King Jr. evening program featuring Emory Douglas scheduled for Jan. 15 at the Black Box Theatre has been cancelled, according to Edmonds Community College.

However, the community is invited to attend the college’s Brown Bag Lecture with Emory Douglas at 12:30 p.m. on Thurs., Jan. 15 in the Black Box Theatre at Edmonds Community College.

For close to five decades, Douglas has dedicated his life and art to social justice. As a commercial art student at the City College of San Francisco in early 1967, Douglas used his talents to design props and sets for the Black Arts Movement, which operated at San Francisco State University.

In the late 1960s, Douglas was art director for the Black Panther Party’s newspaper and later the party’s Minister of Culture. As the Minister of Culture, his political artwork articulated the party’s messages of black freedom.

Douglas’ artistic talents proved a powerful force. His striking collages of photographs and his own drawings combined to create some of the era’s most iconic images of the black power movement.

From 1984 to 2005, Douglas worked as a layout artist and graphic designer for the black owned Sun Reporter Publishing Company in San Francisco. Today, Douglas continues to use his art as a tool to raise social consciousness of injustice.

With the publishing of his book, “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Artwork of Emory Douglas” in 2007, Douglas has gone on to serve as Artist in Residence at Elam International School of Fine Arts, in Auckland, New Zealand, as well as collaborate on numerous public art projects across the United States, and around the world.

A representation of Douglas’ artwork is currently on display at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

More information can be found at www.edcc.edu/equityandinclusion/get-connected/mlk-events.html.