[1] She exposed the American diet industry's exploitation of women in Feeding on Dreams (MacMillanUSA, 1994), written with psychologist Diane Pinkert Epstein.

She was co-author, with pre-eminent historian Darlene Clark Hine, of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America.

She then collaborated with Hilary Mac Austin on three print documentaries of groups underrepresented in American history: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (Indiana University Press, 1999), Children of the Depression (Indiana University Press, 2000), and America's Children: Repicturing Childhood from Exploration to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2001).

Thompson also served on the board of senior editors with Hine, Deborah Grey White, Brenda Stephenson, and other major scholars in the field on the second edition of the landmark encyclopedia Black Women in America (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[5] Thompson worked with Medea to present one of the first rape conferences in the country, which took place in 1972 at the Chicago Loop Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA),[6] then under the leadership of feminist activist Diann Deweese Smith.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, that began to change with books such as But Some of Us Are Brave (Feminist Press, 1982), edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith; Paula Giddings' When and Where I Enter (Harper Collins, 1984) and Deborah Gray White's Ar'nt I a Woman (W. W. Norton, 1985), as well as many others.

In the 1990s, historian Darlene Clark Hine published widely in the field and encouraged the work of other scholars with publications such as the series Black Women in United States History.

After working with Hine on a young adult version of Black Women in America, Kathleen Thompson co-authored with her A Shining Thread of Hope.

This was the first narrative history of black women in America and was hailed by Cornel West as "a canonical text for American historians.

A Shining Thread of Hope is such a book, marking a giant step in the creation of a more encompassing portrait of our nation's past.

She graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in philosophy in 1968 and began working at a number of jobs in an attempt to support herself while writing.