They own the house. Why won’t they cut the grass?

Just four doors down from the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in west Jackson, a tangled mass of bushes, trees and vines obscure a house with a caved-in roof at 2300 Margaret Walker Alexander Drive.

Inside the only room left standing, pieces of plaster and foam insulation cover the sunken floor. A radio, an ornate console table and floor-length drapes, still hanging behind steel-frame windows, are the sole indications that someone once cared for this place.

In August, the storied home will go up for auction for the 7th year in a row because of unpaid taxes – joining thousands of properties across Jackson stuck in a complicated loop and for which no one claims responsibility.

Nearly 30 years ago, the home’s original owner, a fashionable woman named Arthurine Wansley, impre