It’s a bright morning in April when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. takes the stage in a crowded auditorium in midtown Manhattan. “This company is not for sale,” he says, his voice sounding heavy. He wears a charcoal suit with a red tie, and his shoulders sag slightly, as if the ghosts of three generations of Ochs-Sulzbergers, publishers of the New York Times, are pressing down on them.

Several hundred New York Times Co. stockholders are gathered at the paper’s sleek new headquarters, in an amphitheater overlooking a garden of birch trees. All eyes are on Sulzberger. Like most newspaper concerns today, his company has routinely been described as embattled, but this particular meeting seethes with even more tension than usual. Two hedge funds have amassed a 20 percent stake in Times Co. stock, so Sulzberger, 57, the company chairman and the publisher of its flagship daily, needs to make a determined stand. “Every member of the family deeply cares about this company and its mission,” he says.

As he speaks, his eyes dart toward a corner of the room, where his father and predecessor as publisher, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, 82, sits frozen in an electric wheelchair in the front row, wearing a crisp checkered shirt with a yellow silk pocket square. A young woman hovers beside him, spooning what looks like yogurt into his mouth. For a moment, the son stares at the father. “This company will continue to have the ownership that it has today,” Sulzberger says.

That same day, some 850 miles to the south, Raymond Harbert is preparing for a round at the Mountain Brook Club, according to a golf-shop employee. The club is an oasis where the elite of Birmingham, Alabama, go for golf, tennis, lunch, and gossip. Harbert, 49, is an heir to the largest private fortune in the state and, almost by chance, a key figure in this latest assault on the venerable old newspaper. (View a slideshow comparing the Sulzbergers with the Harberts.)

Harbinger Capital Partners, a hedge fund founded seven years ago with Harbert family money, is currently the largest Times Co. shareholder outside of the Sulzberger family. In the spring, the fund, along with a partner, forced two representatives onto the Times Co.’s board of directors with the stated aim of pushing management to improve the stock price—although some fear they are after much more. It is an understandable worry. The move comes soon after Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family, proving—once again—that blood ties and family tradition are no match for determined billionaires.

And so the fate of the country’s (and perhaps the world’s) most esteemed journalistic institution will be determined, in part, by a fortune that was made a half-century ago in the coal mines of Kentucky and on the highways of Alabama by a man who carried a sidearm into union drives and never met a Republican he didn’t like. It’s an irony fit for the pages of the New York Times.

After Atlanta, Birmingham is the No. 2 financial hub in the South, a small city whose downtown, crowded with undistinguished office buildings, is home to corporations such as Regions Financial and HealthSouth. The area, prone to summer thunderstorms of biblical proportions, is no longer known by its old nickname, Bombingham, which stems from an incident in which four black girls were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in a 1963 church blast. The city was built by industrialist owners of steel mills and coal mines, and the Red Mountain Expressway leads south from town toward the homes of many of their heirs in the neighborhood of Mountain Brook, where rich people live in pretty mansions in the hills.

Raymond Harbert is one of them. Described as street-smart and astute by those who know him, Harbert, in 1990, at the age of 31, took over Harbert Corp., the $500 million conglomerate his father, John Harbert III, created just after World War II. Since then, Harbert has transformed it from a company that built power plants, pipelines, and highways around the world into a passive investment firm, Harbert Management Corp., which manages $25 billion for the Harbert family and many outside clients. Through it all, he has been living a mostly quiet life with his wife and three kids. But when H.M.C. took an aggressive stake in the New York Times Co. In January, people started to wonder who this secretive Southern mogul was, where his money came from, and what he was doing mucking with the Times.