Papers of Tia Cross, 1963-2007

Tia Cross was born on September 16, 1949, to Harold and Patricia (Crocker) Cross in Concord, Massachusetts. She graduated from Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1967. Cross went on to complete three years of undergraduate study at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and one year of nursing school at the Catherine Labouré School of Nursing in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She continued her education at the Art Institute of Boston, graduating from a three-year photography program in 1981. In 1984, Cross entered the Off-Campus Study Program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, to finish her bachelor's degree and earn a master's degree. Cross did finish her bachelor's degree and earned her teaching certificate from Goddard College, but had to leave the school for personal reasons before finishing the master's program. Tia Cross, who had been named after her mother Patricia, officially changed her first name in 1989. Cross left the Boston area in 1983, moving first to Barnard, Vermont, and later to Burlington, Vermont. In 1993 Cross returned to Massachusetts, eventually settling on Cape Cod.

In 1974 Cross and Marsha Spellman co-founded the Boston Women's Music Collective, which hosted Boston's first multi-racial conference on women in music, featuring 50 performers. In 1978 Cross became an active member of the Bessie Smith Memorial Production Collective, which saw itself as a catalyst for women becoming actively involved in the issue of racism within the women's movement in the Boston area. The collective, founded by members of the Combahee River Collective, produced the "Varied Voices of Black Women: An Evening of Words and Music." This event was held at several Boston area locations, including the women's prison in Framingham, Massachusetts. In 1979 Cross founded Cross Cultural Communications, which brought anti-racist, anti-homophobic workshops and classes to businesses and community organizations such as the Digital Equipment Corporation, the Haymarket People's Fund, the National Conferences on Women and Law, and the University of Vermont. The workshops often included awareness training for an organization's staff members, using consciousness-raising techniques, role playing, and discussions. Introductory workshops focused on awareness and personal experiences with racism or being racist. In-depth, problem-solving discussions were held during second and third workshops. Cross ran the programs alone when the group consisted of only white people, whereas when the group was diverse, she would ask a friend of color to be co-leader, correspondingly Cross would also co-lead workshops for friends of color when needed. Cross felt that racism and sexual politics were interrelated, and that both issues included class politics, economics, and imperialism. Her goal was to increase group and personal awareness of the issues, and to improve interpersonal, intergroup communication so that racism could be dealt with in an ongoing, committed way. Cross also offered anti-racist workshops and trainings through a local multi-cultural political group called the Boston People's Organization. In 1981 Cross was asked, both by the National Women's Studies Association and the New England Women's Studies Association to teach anti-racism workshops during their annual conferences, and also to train other white women to be diversity workshop facilitators. After moving to Vermont in 1983, Cross perceived the need for a statewide anti-racism coordination agency and multi-cultural resource center. In 1988 she founded the Multi-Cultural Council of Vermont, creating a non-partisan, activist communications center that would provide both educational resources and leadership in initiating and coordinating community organizing against racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and ageism. Cross believed in combining cultural celebrations such as music, dancing, and the arts with education and political organizing. The Multi-Cultural Council of Vermont merged these ideas in the first multi-cultural conference and celebration of diversity in Vermont in 1990. Today, Cross is still teaching anti-racism and diversity workshops in towns around Massachusetts.

Cross worked as a freelance photographer and videographer from 1978 to 1996, and has had her photographs exhibited in the Smithsonian Institution's "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement" group show, the Womanworks Gallery in Albany, New York, and in a one-woman show at Modern Times Café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cross's photography has been published in Sojourner, New Women Times, and Heresies: Racism Is the Issue. Cross produced several slide shows, including "Visionary Women: A History of Lesbian Photographers," which focused on Clementina Lady Howarden, Emma Jane Gay, Alice Austen, and Joan E. Biren. In 1985 Cross, along with Dorothy Todd, co-founded the Vermont Women's TV Network, allowing women from all over Vermont to produce and show films, news programs, bulletin boards, shows for kids, and conference proceedings.

From 1985 through 1990 Cross lectured and ran workshops on women's studies, feminism, and photography at Burlington College, Vermont. She also sat on an ad hoc committee that organized the formation of a Burlington College faculty association. In 1989 Cross brought her feminist studies classes to the women incarcerated at the Chittenden County Correctional Center in Vermont.

Cross has served several community organizations in different capacities: co-chair of the Boston People Against Racism and the Klan; co-founder of Duck Village Neighborhood Food Co-op in Somerville, Massachusetts; advisory council member for Women of Power magazine; and as president of the board for the Multi-Cultural Council of Vermont. In 1982 Cross joined the forum committee of the newly organized Boston Women's Coalition, which was formed after a women's movement conference. The group hoped to build networks among feminist groups in the Boston Area, in order to revitalize the women's movement. In 1990 Cross was asked to join the Board of Directors the YWCA of Vermont, and became chair of the program committee in 1991.