BEALE Magazine

BEALE was a Black-owned regional men's magazine published out of Memphis, Tennessee from 1968 to 1976. Founded by Curtis "Curt" Holloway—a 26-year-old Army veteran who came home from Vietnam in November 1967 to a city that was about to come apart at the seams—BEALE was distributed across the mid-South, sold out of barbershops, record shops, juke joints, cab stands, pool halls, and the back counter of every Black-owned grocery between Beale Street and the Mississippi Delta.

Curt grew up in North Memphis, two blocks from the Stax studio at McLemore and College. He worked the loading dock at Satellite Records from 1963 until he was drafted in 1965. When Dr. King was killed at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, Curt was working as a bouncer at Club Paradise on East Georgia. By the end of that week he had decided what to spend his combat pay on: a used multilith offset press, a stack of newsprint, and the lease on a one-room storefront on Vance Avenue.

The magazine was entirely black-and-white—even cheaper than Kudzu, printed on the same kind of newsprint the Tri-State Defender used. The paper turned brown within six months. The ink rubbed off on your hands. The staples were too small and the magazine fell apart if you carried it in your back pocket too long. It cost sixty cents at the newsstand. Curt didn't care. The whole point was that it was cheap enough that a man working second shift at the Firestone plant could pick one up with his pack of Kools and not feel guilty about it.

BEALE survived the closing of Stax in 1975 but not by much. By 1976 the offset press was breaking down every other week, and Curt's wife wanted him to take a salaried job. He sold the BEALE name to a Houston publisher who never put out another issue, and went to work as a printer for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The archive was donated by Curt's widow to the Hooks Institute at the University of Memphis in late 2024. Read more in our blog.