It’s fitting Garrett Temple will make his return on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For Temple — a natural leader the Nets call “The President” — King doesn’t represent just a day or a holiday but the epitome of community service that exemplifies how he tries to live.

“What he did for civil rights was very strong, very powerful. He was able to do it in a way that was received by the masses,” Temple, who has missed three games with a knee injury, told The Post. “But what I’d tell people when this day comes around is we’re nowhere near where we need to be. … The fact MLK didn’t even ask for recompense or reparations … just civil rights, and people were at his rack about it, shows how bad the world was.

“And to this day we have people that are very ignorant and people that know but just don’t care or don’t want things to change. So I’d say acknowledging that we’re far away, that there’s still a problem and actively doing something, not just saying, ‘Well, I’m not racist but I’m just going to sit over here.’ You’re basically feeding fuel to the fire.”

It’s a conversation Temple had Friday with lawyer Bryan Stevenson at a Cobble Hill screening of “Just Mercy.” The film is based on Stephens’ memoirs about the Walter McMillian case in which a black man was wrongfully imprisoned for the 1986 murder of a white woman in Alabama and sentenced to death.

The Nets paid for one screening and Temple for another.

“The conversation has to be had, people need to be educated. The younger you understand and are educated about the problems in our society and the things that aren’t right, the quicker you can change,” Temple said. “I just try to do my part.”

Doing his part is how Temple was taught.

Near the family home in Kentwood, La., Martin Luther King Jr. Street intersects C.B. Temple Road, named for Temple’s late grandfather, Collis B. Temple Sr., the patriarch whose values the family still carries.

Temple’s father, Collis Jr., owns and caretakes 25 group homes, while his mother, Soundra, founded a shelter for battered women and a detox center. His aunt Valeria is the principal of a family-owned school and his stepmother is a judge.

For this family, giving back isn’t lip service, but a lifestyle.

“It’s all-in. It’s completely in,” said Temple, who joined Joe Harris in Hoops2O, a program to fund wells in East Africa.

Temple is the vice president of the Players Association, and the Nets gush he could be president of something much bigger someday.

“He’s the perfect guy,” Kenny Atkinson said.

There is predictable fatherly pride from the man who raised him.

“I’m extremely proud he’s moving forward in the direction of not just being a basketball guy but a guy who can make a difference in a lot of ways and make a meaningful impact,” Collis Jr. told the Post.

“He’s going to make a good mark. … He’s moving in the right direction. I’m hoping he can really impact the NBA in that when he leaves it’ll be a better place because of his time there.”

From Temple’s great grandparents on, they were all college educated and felt a responsibility to give back.

“It was really important that you reach back and give back any way you could, that was my family mantra,” said Collis Jr., who grew up in the Jim Crow era of the civil rights movement.

In 1969 — the year after King’s assassination — the Kentwood schools were integrated. With locals brandishing guns and pitchforks, it required police and the National Guard.

But in a situation he calls reminiscent of “Remember the Titans,” Collis Jr. switched from quarterback to receiver, and won a state title. The white player who ended up throwing passes to him? And being a basketball teammate, and a lifelong friend?

Jamie Spears, the father of star singer Britney Spears.

“I just talked to Jamie three days ago. We had 50-year football reunion four months ago. … We had good experiences, a little small-town good experience,” said Collis Jr., who remembers taking Britney fishing.

“We’d go brim fishing [as] a little girl, small; Britney was 7 or 8. She used to win all the little miss contests; she had trophies taller than her. It was good times.”

Some of the times were less good, for Collis Jr. and for Temple’s grandfather, Collis Sr.

While Garrett Temple helped LSU to the Final Four in 2006, the family relationship with the school goes back a lot further, into some bleak times.

Collis Sr. was rejected by LSU’s Masters program in 1955 because of his skin. Even after Thurgood Marshall’s class-action suit forced the state to give him a grant, it paid for him to go away to Michigan State rather than have an educated black man on campus.

When Collis Jr. enrolled later, in 1971, he encountered an older sociology classmate speaking on “Free Speech Alley,” spewing N-words and hate. It was future Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke; but that didn’t stop the then-freshman from debating him.

“Full-speed ahead. … You had to do that,” said Collis Jr., who was LSU’s first black ballplayer. “You pass by he’d use all the derogatory terms and spread negative [speech]. I couldn’t afford not to debate him. That’s how it was, how it had to be.”

Collis Jr. had the same attitude when he insisted on playing at Vanderbilt in 1974 despite death threats.

“It was interesting and challenging,” Collis Jr. said. “A lot of instances it was a lot more challenging.”

Temple faces different challenges now, ones that in the long run are more far-reaching than playing backup minutes to Kyrie Irving.

He looks at how he can make an impact, and is considering law school as one way.

“The prison industrial complex and how incarceration rates of blacks are so much higher than those of whites obviously,” said Temple. “Honestly, just the young black kids getting into the prison system at such an early age.

“Prosecutors have a very important job, the ways laws are made right now. They have a lot more pull than judges, or anybody else in the judicial system. Those are the people that can really change a kid’s life. So those type of things I’ve learned about the law have intrigued me in being able to make big changes.”