NORTHAMPTON — Just as the crowd of 2,000-some Women’s March walkers convened near Sheldon Field on Saturday morning, the man in black — his face covered except for his eyes — stood nearby. The swastika on the flag he waved through the air with both hands soon drew a crowd.

Hampshire College student Maximilian Beauchene, 21, said he and a friend were on a bus headed into downtown Northampton when the jarring and unmistakable emblem, infamously associated with Nazi Germany before and during World War II, caught their eye on Bridge Street.

Beauchene got off the bus and confronted the man wielding the notorious symbol, filming the encounter.

The video in its edited form runs about 3 minutes long and had been shared from Beauchene’s personal Facebook page more than 400 times as of Monday afternoon.

“That was the most bizarre thing. I’ve had interactions with people of this political mindset before,” Beauchene said. “I really got the impression that he didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t know why he was there. He never gave a justification for it.”

The man, who never identified himself to Beauchene or the dozen others who gathered around him, actually didn’t say much at all. Surely, one woman told him, he must be ashamed of his ideology because he opted to mask his face.

“I’m not ashamed of myself,” the man told her in the video. “It’s for people I know.”

“You should wave the flag,” one man said facetiously off-camera. “People aren’t sure about your political beliefs.”

Sure enough, the man with his face covered hoisted the flag above his head and waved it in the direction of traffic as cars sped by on Bridge Street.

In the video, two city police officers can be seen confronting the group. Capt. John Cartledge said Monday that the officers had been in the area previously to monitor crowds and traffic during the Women’s March and were not dispatched to the scene. No citations or arrests were made in connection with the incident, he said, and the man with the flag left the area after about a half-hour.

“As police, we’re there to make sure everyone’s safe,” Cartledge said.

“The guy has the right to be there,” Beauchene said. “He can fly whatever flag he wants … (but) you have an obligation, you have a duty to confront ideologies like that.”

Beauchene is right. The man hoisting the flag baring the Nazi insignia was, in fact, within his Constitutional rights to do so.

“It’s constitutionally protected speech — but do I think there’s a moral and civic obligation to confront right-wing, white supremacists?” said Bill Newman, director of the Western Regional Law Office of ACLU Massachusetts. “Absolutely.”

Otherwise, Newman said, “we’d be accepting Nazi propaganda as normal in our community.”

Meanwhile, Jeff Napolitano, who works as the director of the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee, a social justice nonprofit, said that, as uncommon as this particular sight is, it should not be dismissed.

“I’ve been here for eight years, and I have not seen or heard actual Nazis showing up,” he said. “It’s this one guy, but I don’t think that he can be dismissed at all.”

Napolitano emphasized civil de-escalation practices and calmly engaging with folks such as the man who had the Nazi flag.

“Recording and spreading the word is an important thing to do,” he said. “We need to know this is here in order to identify ways to counteract it … AFSC is a pacifist organization, so (we’re) spiritually, philosophically and just logistically opposed to physical violence to counteract them. We have to come up with more creative ways to shut hate down.”

Michael Majchrowicz can be reached at mmajchrowicz@gazettenet.com.