Beal was born in Binghamton, New York to Charlotte Berman Yates and Ernest Yates. Her mother"s Russian Jewish immigrant background and father"s African American and Native American ancestry, along with their experiences with antisemitism and racism, inspired her later work as an activist.
After her father"s death, she moved to Saint Albans, an integrated neighborhood in Queens. In 1958, she began work in political activism with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They lived in France, from 1959 to 1966, as she attended the Sorbonne. In 1968, she co-founded the Black Women"s Liberation Committee of SNCC. She wrote "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" in 1969.
That pamphlet was later revised and then published in The Black Woman, an anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara in 1970.
A revised version of "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" also appears in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women"s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Beal now lives in Oakland.
