Bradley J. Rayford grew up going to work with his father, Oscar Rayford, a photographer for KMOV. At Hazelwood Central High School, his camera was such a constant fixture, he said, that other students “would ask where it was and if I was okay” when he wasn’t toting it. At St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley, he worked as a staff photographer for the school newspaper.
But it was the Ferguson unrest that made him a nationally award-winning photojournalist at age 23.
Rayford showed up at Ferguson on his own initiative on August 9, the day Michael Brown Jr. was killed, and started shooting news footage until his batteries died. MSNBC aired a feature about his work that he edited himself. Soon he was freelancing for MSNBC, the L.A. Times, Huffington Post and international media organizations.
For this work, he won two national awards in the 2015 Salute to Excellence in Digital Media category from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).
The mini-documentary he created for MSNBC, “Ferguson: A Resident’s Perspective,” won first place in the “Online Project: Feature” category. A piece he did with MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee and Stefanie Cargill, about a group of Ferguson protestors’ surprising effort to keep Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson in power, won best “Single Story: News.”
Rayford returned from the NABJ awards ceremony in Minneapolis with plans to finish his associate’s degree and then either pursue a bachelor’s degree locally or move to New York in pursuit of full-time work in journalism.
Rayford said he nearly passed on submitting the NABJ award entries because he didn’t think his work was good enough. The sentiment is typical of a young journalist with a humble charisma that drew the attention of the world’s most seasoned media vets who worked alongside him in Ferguson.
It all goes back to his father, the KMOV photographer.
“My dad was a major part in shaping my interest, drive and dedication,” Rayford said. “It comes from him.”
Rayford also credited his church, United Christian Ministries, high school teachers and college professors with supporting him and helping him to succeed.
“In anything that you want to do, learn as much as you can about it and get as much advice as you can about it, and then go about the business of doing it,” Oscar Rayford said he advised his son. “I told Bradley to ‘act like you’re supposed to be there and people will start to respect you as a colleague.’”
It worked.
Rayford also relied on his father’s direct assistance to cover Ferguson, borrowing his dad’s car or getting rides to protest scenes from him.
“The energy was an interesting feeling,” Rayford said of Ferguson. When he first arrived on the scene, he was more accustomed to covering storms and house fires.
Rayford was welcomed by Brown’s family and protestors as a local youth (he lives in Hazelwood) who looked like one of them – who, in many ways, was one of them. Last August he was asking many of the same unsettled questions that sent protestors into the streets and kept them there for months. Yet he tried to maintain a professional distance.
“Here I am, this young black man who is close in age to this kid who was killed,” Rayford said. “I was still wondering myself how it happened. But, at the same time, I had to remain silent and do my job.”
This story is published as part of a partnership between The Huffington Post and The St. Louis American.
