Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, who challenged racial barriers, political skulduggery and environmental adversaries as publisher of The Chattanooga Times in Tennessee for nearly three decades, and who was a member of the family that controls The New York Times, died on Wednesday at her home in Chattanooga. She was 96.

Her family confirmed her death.

Growing up in a newspaper family in New York, Mrs. Holmberg was imbued from adolescence with journalistic traditions of social responsibility, and that heritage became manifest in Chattanooga as she presided over a newspaper known for aggressive, analytical reporting and editorials that denounced racial segregation, exposed government corruption and demanded cleaner air in a city of heavy industry and belching smokestacks.

For years she was a pariah in a city where many regarded her as an Eastern liberal interloper.

Mrs. Holmberg, who was publisher of The Chattanooga Times from 1964 to 1992, stayed on as publisher emeritus and chairwoman until 1999, when it was sold to a small chain and merged with a rival newspaper. (Though it was owned by her family, the paper was never part of The New York Times Company.)

She was a granddaughter of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought The Chattanooga Times in 1878 and The New York Times in 1896, and the second of four children of Iphigene Ochs and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961.