Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial

The Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment Memorial features a bronze relief of a young white officer on horseback leading his Black soldiers forward. It commemorates the first volunteer Black infantry unit raised in the North during the Civil War. When Augustus Saint-Gaudens began sculpting the piece in eighteen eighty-four, he spent years refining the faces of the soldiers, hiring Black men from the neighborhood as models to ensure each soldier possessed a distinct, individual likeness before the bronze was cast.