Sulzberger was born to a
Jewish family on March 12, 1921 in
New York City, the second of four children of
Iphigene Sulzberger (née Ochs) and
Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Her father served as publisher of
The New York Times from 1935 to 1961 and her maternal grandfather was
Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of
The Chattanooga Times and
The New York Times. Sulzberger attended the Lincoln School and
Brearley School; and then graduated from
Smith College in 1943. She worked as a Red Cross volunteer during
World War II in England and France assigned to the
394th Bombardment Group of the
Ninth Air Force. In 1946, she moved to
Chattanooga,
Tennessee with her then husband, Ben Hale Golden, who was to train to become the eventual publisher of
The Chattanooga Times. Chattanooga at the time was not very welcoming to either northern liberals or Jews (even those who were married to Christians as she was). In 1957, her husband was named publisher and resigned in 1964; the couple divorced in 1965 and Sulzberger succeeded him as publisher. While she was publisher, the Chattanooga Times took on an anti-establishment tone supporting the racial integration of schools, civil rights legislation, clean-air laws, anti-corruption initiatives, and an expanded role for blacks in local government. In the 1980s, she merged the newspaper's back office with arch-rival
The News-Free Press although keeping news and editorials separate. In 1984, she was elected president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1987, she was elected a director of
The Associated Press, the second woman to do so after
Katharine Graham. In 1997, Sulzberger and her siblings transferred ownership of The Chattanooga Times to their 13 children who sold it to
Walter E. Hussman Jr. of the Wehco Media Company who merged it with
The News-Free Press to form the
Chattanooga Times Free Press. She served on the board of The New York Times from 1961 to 1998. ==Philanthropy==