LOS ANGELES — The smell of bacon and eggs swirls throughout the air as forks clink against plates and snippets of light conversation float around the room. It’s a Monday morning, but this crowd of approximately 200 community members isn’t worried about making it to an office meeting. They’re here at a breakfast banquet in a Radisson hotel on Jan. 19 to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and to kick off the 19th annual Kingdom Day Parade, a Los Angeles tradition that recognizes the legacy of the civil rights leader.

Almost everyone has arrived, including Councilman Martin Ludlow, who is this year’s grand marshal, and other important-looking officials. But there is still one person noticeably absent.

He enters fashionably late. Dressed impeccably in a taupe suit, he sports a long scarf around his shoulders, like a French director or 1940s film star. His perfect, feathered coiffure accents his regal appearance, and he appears to glide through the crowd like a quiet wave. Everybody seems to know him. He shakes hands warmly and intensely. His hugs are ended when he gently rubs another’s back. He extends his arm slowly to those whose backs are to him and rests his hand on their shoulder until they turn around and are face to face with Grandmaster Tong Suk Chun.

The crowd at the Kingdom Day Parade watches as a Korean dance troupe performs a traditional dance.

Fifty-five years old, Chun is the co-chairman of the Kingdom Day Parade, a role he has been committed to for 15 years. And because he has been engulfed in the event for so long, the day simply does not begin without him.

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In South Los Angeles on Stocker Street, floats are lined up, ready to begin their procession down Crenshaw Boulevard in front of the thousands of faces that have lined the street. The Black Eyed Peas’ song, “Where is the Love?” is blaring from the speakers of one float that sports a banner reading, “Walking the earth as brothers and sisters.”

Here, only 20 minutes after the pancake breakfast, Chun has turned into a lightning bug. Every so often he is spotted amidst the floats and parade participants, but then he is gone in an instant, without a trace.

His work, however, is seen everywhere. Women in colorful hanboks speckle the crowd and cars, while prestigious-looking Korean men stroll around, one of whom is Dr. Kun Mo Chung, a native of Korea who is one of the parade’s international grand marshals. A traditional Korean dance troupe is preparing, as well as a taekwondo class.

On the move, Chun talks to an irritated resident of South Los Angeles who hadn’t expected the parade to encroach upon her street.

Dressed in a bright green hanbok, Jan Jung, a board member of the World Cultural and Sports Foundation, a nonprofit that Chun founded, praises the man responsible for the inclusion of so many Koreans.

“He’s the only one in our Korean community to put all his efforts and dedication into harmony with the black community,” she says of Chun. “So in the black community, he’s much more well-known than in our Korean community, and all the black community leaders, including even the police academy and highway patrol chiefs, they call him ‘our blood brother.’”