What might a first grader think of an organization called Black Lives Matter? That it exists to nobly fight back against a prevailing belief that black lives are actually worthless? Or that it exists to monetarily enrich a handful of hard-left opportunists by preying on the guilt of gullible white liberals and woke corporations?

The question answers itself, of course. Which is why on this day, of all days, any association between the aforementioned Marxist pressure group and the mission and life’s work of Martin Luther King Jr. should be denounced for what it is: a damned disgrace.

Sadly, the anti-hate hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center sees things differently. The group’s education arm, Learning for Justice, is using the memory of the great civil rights leader to promote a former Oakland schoolteacher’s article to teach first graders about the Black Lives Matter movement and the “need for continued protest and action in the face of ongoing systemic injustice.”

Carol Swain, a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt, called this effort to misappropriate the name and memory of Dr. King what it actually is: “a shameful form of indoctrination.”

Swain, who happens to be black, made clear her objection: “My impression is that a 6-year-old is not prepared to understand anything about ‘systemic injustice’ or systemic racism,” adding that exposing young children to these sorts of materials “robs them of their childhood.”

Indeed, how many first graders even know what a money-grubbing Marxist scam artist is? Because that’s what BLM’s founders are — if we’re to take them at their word and their actions. “The first thing, I think,” said BLM founder and real-estate mogul Patrisse Cullors, “is that we actually do have an ideological frame. … We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Got that? They’re “super-versed.”

They’re also super-rich, having grifted the “white supremacist, capitalist, sexist systems” to the tune of some $90 million, which her organization hauled in from panicky, virtue-signaling corporate America in the wake of the George Floyd killing and 2020’s Long Hot Summer of BLM-inspired rioting.

Where did all that money go, aside from buying assorted luxury homes for BLM’s founders? As our Emmy Griffin has pointed out, BLM’s 990 tax form reveals a scandalous grift.

All this, of course, is a far cry from the writings and teachings and stirring speeches of the man whose name stands for racial equality and adorns today’s federal holiday. “I have a dream,” he said that hot summer day some 60 years ago.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

As for Black Lives Matter, the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez, like professor Swain, calls them out: “BLM is not a struggle for civil rights or for social justice,” Gonzalez noted. “It hides behind these slogans to promote anti-capitalism … the destruction of the family unit, and the abolition of our legal system … [and] ‘systemic’ transformation as all Marxists have done since Marx himself. To manipulate young minors in this manner is child abuse.”

Whatever we might call an organization such as Black Lives Matter, let’s never forget the violence it wrought during the summer of 2020: injury to more than 2,000 police officers, the deaths of more than two dozen people, and property damage estimates approaching $2 billion.

We can’t imagine that Dr. King would have approved.