“We know we did the right thing,” Mr. Strickland said. “I just think this is a big step in the momentum that we’ve already got.”

The City Council, made up of seven black and six white members, voted unanimously to sell the parkland to a nonprofit entity that quickly removed the monuments. The Chamber of Commerce had issued a statement supporting the removal in August. A racially diverse grass-roots coalition, led by an activist, Tami Sawyer, pressured the city to act with persistent, and occasionally disruptive, demonstrations.

Ms. Sawyer, 35, a director of Teach for America who is running for a county commissioner seat, said that many residents were still struggling to find the path to reconciliation.

“I think there’s a lot of people that are trying in Memphis to bridge this racial divide,” she said. “But I think that we have to have honest conversations about why that divide exists. Too often people want to say, ‘Let’s get to the healing,’ but not call out the years of systemic oppression that continue to exist.”

And so the city finds itself hurtling toward the April 4 anniversary, with everyone, it seems, measuring the distance between past pain and real progress, and wondering what the future might bring. Otis Sanford, a newspaper columnist and journalism professor at the University of Memphis, has written often about the sins of the city’s past and the challenges in its future. On Thursday, he sounded positive notes, saying that many statue supporters seemed to come from outside the city, and that inside the city limits, a new, more tolerant generation was helping steer Memphis in new directions.

“From a racial standpoint, we’re at a much better place now than we’ve ever been, and that’s saying a lot when you’ve got racial divisions and political divisions around the country,” he said.