In 1896, the black paper, The Leavenworth Herald, edited by Blanche Ketene Bruce, called Thompson the "best newspaper correspondent on the colored press.

[4] His father was a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Connection Church, and died in 1872. later that year he moved with his mother, Jane, to New Albany, Indiana.

[7] Jane Thompson played a leading role in the community of Indianapolis's Jones Tabernacle A. M. E. Zion church.

[8] Thompson had two wives, Grace Evelyn Lucas and Ella B Gibbs, both of whom taught together in Indianapolis Public Schools.

At that time, in connection with his school duties, he kept books for Dr. F. W. Ferree, secretary of the Marion County Board of Health.

[5] The Indianapolis World was launched by Edward Elder Cooper, Edwin E. Horn, and Levi E. Christy with Thompson in charge of the city department.

He came first in a civil service exam ahead of 75 whites in 1888[19] and on August 1 was appointed a letter carrier in the Indianapolis Post Office by Postmaster Aquillo Jones, where he served until July 1893.

Thompson saw the change in the nature of the festivities not so much related to the aging and deaths of so many blacks born into slavery and replacement by people who were born after, but instead as due to the evolution of black social structure, saying that Frederick Douglass, Blanche Bruce, and James D. Lynch were "as far away from the colored people at the other end of the social scale as the most exclusive white society man thinks himself to be from the most humble white laborer."

In September of that year he was promoted to chief clerkship of the counting division, which position he held in July 1895 but had left by 1899.

Thompson emphasized that class lines were based on authentic characteristics such as character, worth, morals, and conduct, and not on the color of skin, texture of hair, or money.

[22] Throughout his life, Thompson became very close with many Washington elites, including Henrietta Vinton Davis,[23] James E. Slaughter, W. Bishop Johnson,[24] T. Thomas Fortune, Paul Bray, Lester Walton, James H. Anderson, William O. Minard, N. B. Dodson, George W. Harris,[25] and R. E. S.

[19] In 1900 he was elected president of D.C.'s Second Baptist Lyceum, one of a number of black D.C. clubs which heard talks from intellectuals and artists and debated issues of the day.

Marshall as first and second vice-president, Emma E. Tolliver, Almira Cautchfield, and Birdie Miller as recording, financial, and responding secretaries, Evelyn Cary as Treasurer, and T. H. Norman, Benjamin Washington, Lillian V. Green, B. T. Holme, and Thomas Ware.

[30] By 1899, Thompson was managing editor of the Colored American, and in the early 1900s he ran what was called the Negro Press Bureau, a syndicated news service to about a dozen black newspapers which Booker T. Washington secretly subsidized and which was one of his prime agencies for influencing black editors.

[31] In 1903, Thompson was receiving $12 per month from Washington or the Tuskegee Institute to subsidize his income and to pay for pro-Washington reportage.

[34] In 1999, Jacqueline M. Moore argued that Thompson's paper failed to hold his ground against Ferris, who was present at the talk.

In support of Washington were Robert H. Terrell, Bishop Walters, Dr. William Bruce Evans, J. H. Ewing, and Thompson, and those against were W. H. Ferris, Armond W. Scott, Lafayette M. Hershaw, T. M. Dent, Shelby James Davidson, and Mrs. Ida D.

Thompson's articles about these meetings in support of Washington's position was published in the Atlanta Age, the Indianapolis Freeman, Philadelphia Tribune, Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, The Charleston WV Advocate, and the Colored American.

[36] This controversy continued into the summer where important meetings in Louisville and Boston saw heated argument which even led to blows and Trotter's and Granville Martin's imprisonment.

Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter founded the Niagara Movement as a call for opposition to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, and it was opposed to policies of accommodation and conciliation promoted by African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington.

Washington requested that Emmett Scott direct Thompson and other newspaper men, including W. Calvin Chase, to ignore the Niagara Movement.

Washington used his political influence with Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft to try to remove Lafayette Hershaw and Freeman H. M. Murray from their government positions and spy on meetings of the Niagara Movement.

[48] In the spring of 1914, Thompson helped J. Finlay Wilson to start a new black paper in Washington, DC, called the Sun.

[49] Thompson was a principal contributor to the paper, which switched leadership from Wilson to T. Thomas Fortune in the summer of 1914, and continued to provoke the ire of Chase.

[51] After Thompson's death, Chase was in a bitter battle to remove Roscoe Conkling Bruce from his position as assistant superintendent of DC schools in charge of colored schools and supported Thompson's daughter, Vivian, in an effort to gain for her a position as a teacher against Bruce's opposition.