Her great-uncle Frank Richard Veal was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and president of the historically black Allen University (South Carolina) and Paul Quinn College (Texas).
In 1977, she was hired as a special consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which she developed the NEH's first program of technical assistance to black museums and historical organizations.
That same year, she became the founding executive director of the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and National Archives for Black Women's History (BMA) in Washington, D.C., which was headquartered in a former private house.
As an "Affiliate Unit of the National Park Service" it received a small annual stipend, however BMA was forced to raise its own funding to support several positions, programming and exhibitions.
Grants and funding from NEH and NEA, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, Lilly Endowment, Washington, DC Humanities, and small donations from General Electric, local banks and individuals contributed to the institutions growth and success.
[citation needed] Collier-Thomas's book Jesus, Jobs and Justice (2010) examines the ways in which both black and white Protestant women dealt with racial issues in the first half of the 20th century, prefiguring the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement.