NORTH OMAHA -- Dan Goodwin paused from his work at his Spencer Street Barber Shop and shut off the buzzing clippers.

"You won"t find any better guy than him anywhere in the country," he said of his friend and the man who has served the longest in the Nebraska Legislature.

Even before he went to the Legislature 38 years ago, Goodwin says, people would line up at the shop to tell him their problems, every kind of problem, with the police, landlords, bosses, teachers, politicians. Lawyers would contact him for help, too.

"He"s very unique ... truly a genius," Goodwin said. "People think he can deal with anything."

But magic? No. Ernie Chambers cannot perform magic.

What the lifelong resident of north Omaha"s District 11 has done for the people there -- and for many from around the state -- has produced something more powerful than magic.

He has given them someone who will stand up, say things on their behalf that no one else will say, and make them proud.

"As far as the north side is concerned, he"s the best thing we"ve had in the Legislature since the invention of sliced bread," said Omaha Star publisher Marguerita Washington.

He"s visionary, said Ruth Thomas, 87, a former social worker.

"He has foreseen things that most of us did not."

District 11 voters sent Chambers to Lincoln to represent them in 1970. He was 33. The community had just gone through four years of serious unrest.

Beginning in 1963, blacks around the country had begun taking to the streets, clashing with police, demanding equal rights and expressing frustration at discrimination and injustice. It spread to Omaha in the summer of 1966.

Chambers, who graduated from Creighton University in 1959 with a bachelor"s degree in history, and minors in Spanish and philosophy, spent the "60s speaking out on civil rights -- in Omaha and across the country -- and expressing his own anger at the treatment of black people.

His reputation as a leader and solver of problems in the black community developed long before that. As early as high school, at Omaha Tech, people went to him when they needed help. In his teenage years, he was already writing letters to the Omaha World-Herald"s Public Pulse.

But he was viewed by white people as radical and dangerous, he said, "which obviously I was not."

White people fear black people because they know, he said, how they would react if they were treated the way black people are.

"They"re just waiting for that light bulb to come on in our brains," he said.

In reality, he said, he"s helped so many white people -- both in his district and outside -- he"s lost count.

Ten times, Chambers was elected and re-elected to represent District 11.

"For the most part, no one ran against him," Star publisher Washington said. "If they did, they didn"t have a ghost of a chance."

Chambers didn"t campaign. He didn"t need to.

"His attitude was, 'If you want me, you"ll vote for me, and if you don"t want me you won"t vote for me. Simple as that,"" Washington said.

Chambers has fought for decades to improve conditions on the north side of Dodge Street, many times a lone voice in the legislative wilderness.

"He met a lot of opposition from senators, many from small towns who didn"t recognize what he was trying to do, or were indifferent," Washington said. "So he has not always been able to accomplish what he wanted to."

He is perhaps best known among his constituents for laws that allowed for district elections in Omaha for City Council, county board and school board seats.

"Before then, it was impossible for any person of color to be elected to any political position," Washington said.

Not everyone agrees with Chambers" uncompromising view of the death penalty -- that no one, no matter how heinous his or her crime, should be executed by the state. But many of his constituents appreciate that he has been able to chip away at capital punishment, even if he has not yet succeeded in abolishing it, because of their belief that blacks are disproportionately sentenced to death.

Chambers has also acted as a guardian of the 11th legislative district boundaries, to ensure that in redistricting, done every 10 years, the black vote is not diluted.

"Will the next person here protect the interests of the district and its residents the way I have done?" Chambers wonders.

One of the most controversial of his deeds in the Legislature among his black constituents was his support for a 2006 bill that divided Omaha Public Schools into three districts, one a mostly black district in northeast Omaha. Chambers argued the bill allowed for integration, and at the same time for more control by the community. The Omaha district, he argued, was already segregated.

Over the years, Chambers has been a watchdog over the Omaha school district, taking on small battles and large.

One this session involved a boy at an Omaha elementary school who had asked his teacher repeatedly to go to the bathroom. When she refused, he wet his pants in front of his class. In the school nurse"s office, the boy was put in underwear that was too small and a pair of girl"s pants to finish the school day.

When he got home that day, he begged his mother not to make him go back to school.

"If it happened to my child, someone would have to be getting me out of jail," Chambers told senators after recounting the story during a debate.

A bill he proposed this session would have made disciplinary action involving teachers and other certified school employees public information. The bill was killed during debate.

An ongoing criticism of Chambers by residents of his district is that he hasn"t done enough to bring jobs to north Omaha.

"They don"t understand the nature of my work," Chambers said.

His job is to form state policy, he said. No one person can resolve every problem in a community -- social, economic and legal.

He did fight to prevent the north freeway, completed in 1988, from splitting the heart of north Omaha, taking more than 500 residential units, depressing the value of property on both sides, and devastating its sense of community. The freeway drew traffic away from the main 24th Street and 30th Street arterials, hurting businesses.

"I resisted the construction of that freeway for years," he said.

He went door to door, helping gather more than 5,000 petition signatures to present to the Omaha City Council. But council members were unresponsive, he said.

"There"s a limit to what one person, even myself, can do," he said.

The Rev. Larry Menyweather-Woods remembers his first encounter with Chambers. It was 1991, and he was getting ready to represent local ministers at a news conference at 24th and Lake streets about working to end gang violence and about new life for the community.

"I had heard all this clamor about him," Menyweather-Woods said.

Chambers asked to look at the speech he was going to deliver, then proceeded to strike through whole parts of it, removing a full five minutes.

Who was this man changing his words?

"But after I read it, it made more sense. ... He did not destroy the essence. He made it much better," he said.

The reverend learned to be more succinct and make his words more effective.

"He doesn"t know this, but I still have that same piece of paper," he said.

He sees Chambers not only as a wise editor of words, but as a man of vision who continued the struggle for justice and equality when others mistakenly believed it had been achieved.

"He is gifted," he said.

"Prophets come in different sizes, shapes and forms."

Term limits will take Chambers out of the Legislature after this year.

He"s not saying what he will do, but he has promised to continue to fight for the people of north Omaha.

Meanwhile four candidates have declared their intentions to fill not his shoes but at least his seat in Lincoln.

No one will ever replace Chambers, said Omaha North High School junior DeVon Johnson.

"I really admire him and am going to miss him," said North High senior Robin Bryant. "He has had a huge, positive impact on the African-American community."

Shawntal Smith, 32, an Omaha attorney born and raised in District 11, said she recognizes the sacrifice Chambers has made.

"I admire his tenacity, his consistency, his ability to stand for what he believes in, even if it"s not the most popular view," she said.

"It"s important he know people in north Omaha are appreciative of everything he"s done."

Robert Harper, 27, said that even though the goal of term limits was to relieve Chambers of his legislative duties, "at the end of the day, his messages will keep going."

There"s no doubt, barber Dan Goodwin said, that Chambers will be a giant in history.

"There"s not a person at any level -- nation, state, local -- that matches him," he said. "It was important for his own people to see him stand up for them like no one has ever stood before."

As many accolades as Chambers has received, he has had as many -- or more -- condemnations during his legislative career.

He is unconcerned about how people view him.

"They can"t judge me on either score," he says. "They can only see what I allow them to see."

His attention is focused on uplifting his race, raising up people who are at the lowest level, those who make up the base of the societal pyramid, who are weighed down by the world.

He is a simple man, he says.

"I am as transparent as a sheet of window glass, as uncomplicated as a straight line."