[pensive music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - I think what's interesting to me now about seeing this plinth where the monument used to be, is the way that it enacts a kind of erasure of the hundreds of monuments North and South commemorating the Civil War.

So now that they've come down and are coming down in so many places, we see almost a wound, a scar, an absence where those things were once inscribed.

I think that it might make people ask questions that allow us to tell a fuller version of our American history.

To see it and to see something gone is to ask what was there.

♪ ♪ "Here, too, for the Confederacy, an obelisk oblivious in its name, a word that also meant the symbol to denote in ancient manuscripts, the spurious, corrupt, or doubtful.

At its base forged in concrete, a narrative of valor, virtue, states' rights.

Here it is only the history of a word, obelisk, that points us toward what's not there, all of it palimpsest, each mute object repeating a single refrain.

Remember this."