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It wasn’t a birthday we were commemorating. Let’s start out there.

And anyone calling the events remembering the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s death “celebrations” probably meant well, but they were using the wrong word.

What we witnessed or participated in Wednesday were memorial services recognizing one of the most violent acts in American history, the brutal assassination of a peaceful patriot whose death showed us then and reminds now of the work that lies ahead.

Anyone with doubts need look no further than Brooklyn, where we can now add a pipe with a knob to the list of items that shoot-first cops have mistaken for a gun.

Let us not be so surprised that cops could shoot to death another black man without a gun on the same day — in the same hour — that we were paying tribute to the man, the very soul who personified non-violence.

Let us not be shocked that exactly 50 years to the day that King was murdered while leading a national fight against oppression and injustice, including police misconduct and brutality, that we have to yet again remind Brooklyn and the world that Black Lives Matter.

Instead, let us be angry. Instead, let us be outraged. Instead, let us be vigilant.

Let us fight against injustice with the spirit of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity representative who spoke Wednesday at a service at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, just feet from where King died.

“We’ll fight until hell freezes over,” the speaker said, “and then we’ll fight on the ice.”

NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said at a news conference that four officers responding to 911 calls fired 10 shots at the victim, who was described by residents in the Crown Heights neighborhood as emotionally disturbed.

“This was not an emotionally disturbed call,” Monahan said. “This was a call of a man pointing what 911 callers and people felt was a gun at people on the street. When we encounter him, he turns with what appears to be a gun. We have to stay straight on the facts of this incident.”

What Monahan did not tell reporters, at least not yet, was the racial makeup of the officers who fired the fatal shots.

Even if he had shared that detail, I’m not sure how much that would matter. Because it is not the racial makeup of the cop that makes the police shooting of a black man without a gun a racial incident.

What makes these countless deadly encounters racial incidents is that the victims are almost never white.

Not Freddie Gray. Not Sandra Bland. Not Stephon Clark. Not Alton Sterling. Not Rekia Boyd. Not Tamir Rice, or any of the people on the cover of Wednesday’s Daily News featuring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., asking “What would he think?”

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality,” King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech.

We understand that cops make split-second decisions.

Still, it boggles the mind that mass murderers like Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, or Nikolas Cruz who murdered 17 people in a Florida school rampage in February can be arrested without a scratch, yet a man who pointed a pipe on a street corner is as dead as Sean Bell.

How much has changed since King’s death? It’s too soon to tell.

See you in another 50 years.