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America is witnessing the largest instant migration in its history.

In the days and months to come, communities across the nation will attempt to take in more than a quarter-million evacuees from New Orleans, which before Katrina was home to one of the poorest, most insular black populations in the United States.

The resettlement has the makings of a vast and varied social experiment that may try American ideas about race and poverty. And it is likely -- after the first flush of relief and goodwill -- to tax the patience and understanding of both the newcomers and the welcomers.

"We've evacuated most of a Deep South city and we haven't the foggiest idea of what's going to happen six months from now," said Steve Suitts, program coordinator for the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation, which works on issues of educational equity.

Katrina wreaked most of its havoc in Louisiana and Mississippi, the two blackest, poorest states in the country.

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In the days to come, the Katrina diaspora will encounter Main Street America -- in classrooms and hospital emergency rooms, on talk radio shows and ball fields, in chance encounters and town meetings. It's an odd-couple relationship sure to be strained as the adrenaline of public compassion subsides.

"Always in the immediate aftermath of a disaster we have what is called a therapeutic community, where people want to help," said James Johnson, a geographer who is director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"The question is, when does the therapeutic community end and the reality kick back in? Then, what do you do with them?"

It is a problem arriving with speed and magnitude, both without obvious precedent.

Suddenly, said James Elliott, an urban sociologist at Tulane University, people who hadn't ventured a mile beyond their own neighborhoods in decades find themselves swept away to places they may never have heard of before.

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