Greenville, S.C., is where everything you think you know about "Shoeless" Joe Jackson is wrong.

Here in his hometown, where a statue of Shoeless Joe occupies a prominent spot on Main Street, where kids still play on Shoeless Joe field and the Shoeless Joe museum sits just outside the entrance to the lovely minor league baseball stadium, Jackson is no goat. He's a great baseball player and a good man who has been wronged by the keepers of history.

Sure, Jackson's statistics are stellar, but most fans have heard of him only because of his enduring place in popular culture as the most famous symbol of the Black Sox scandal: the Chicago White Sox players' decision, 93 years ago, to throw the 1919 World Series.

"Say it ain't so, Joe," a plaintive young fan is said to have pleaded as his hero walked by after news of the players' corruption broke.

A magnet for fans

But in the tidy little red brick house with white aluminum awnings where Jackson died in 1951, that confrontation never took place. Here, in a museum with a single purpose - to clear one man's name - that famous quotation is revealed as just one more fantasy, one more piece of anti-Jackson propaganda.

Greenville has long been a magnet for legions of fans who believed that Jackson had been wronged. His gravesite, an ordinary bronze marker at Woodlawn Memorial Park near the Bob Jones University campus, has long drawn visitors from across the country.

Today, in the five cramped rooms where Jackson and his wife, Katie, lived out his exile from baseball, that story is told through news clippings, quotations from court documents and testimonials from fellow players.

There's very little in the house that belonged to Jackson - a piece of china, Katie's hand mirror and a chair from the textile mill where Joe worked as a boy. But there's a sweet little library - formerly a narrow screened porch - with a couple of thousand baseball books, donated by a researcher who'd devoted a good chunk of his life to Jackson's vindication. And the 1940s kitchen, a modest mashup of checkerboard linoleum, low counters and a petite pantry, has been restored to the homey look of Jackson's time.

Baseball's official Hall of Fame has only this to say about Jackson: "On January 19, 1934, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis turns down 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson's bid for reinstatement. Jackson was one of eight Chicago White Sox players banned for their part in throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds."

Jackson's defenders

To most of the country, the Black Sox scandal is a metaphor for lost innocence, a moment in our history when a beloved institution faced up to corruption, punished the bad guys and restored our faith in the game.

But in Greenville, it's always spring training for the next season in Shoeless Joe's career. Here, on walls covered with evidence of how Jackson's case differed from those of the other players who took the blame, there's an unabashed argument for his reinstatement on the roster of players eligible for the Hall of Fame.

Jackson was unquestionably one of the best hitters in baseball history, a role model for Babe Ruth and Ted Williams alike. And the legal record is clear: Juries acquitted Jackson of any involvement in the conspiracy in the criminal trial in 1921 and again in a 1924 civil suit that Jackson filed. In the latter, Jackson won a $16,711.04 judgment against White Sox owner Charles Comiskey.

Jackson rarely spoke about the scandal after that, but when he did, he contended that he had tried to report his suspicions about a fix to Comiskey, who allegedly rebuffed him.

But Jackson, who hit a convincing .375 in the Series, setting a major league record for hits, did take $5,000 from a teammate after Game Four of the eight-game series. In the museum's version, Jackson refused to take the cash in his hand, so the teammate simply left it on a table for him. Jackson told a grand jury in 1920 that he'd accepted the money but hadn't participated in any effort to lose a game.

In the years after he was banned from baseball, Jackson started a barbecue restaurant in Greenville and later ran a liquor store. He never learned to read or write. He's believed to have signed his name five times in his life - on his draft card, his driver's license, his mortgage, a baseball and his will, which is in the museum.

In 2005, Congress unanimously passed a resolution seeking Jackson's reinstatement. Since the museum's opening, the fans have just kept coming, young and old alike, making the house what museum director Arlene Marcley calls "ground zero for clearing Joe's name."