 Many of the mob executions committed throughout Texas in the time following the Civil War were racially motivated and often committed by members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which formed in Shelby County, Texas.Most of the people killed by vigilante mobs in the five years after the war were "suspected slave rebels and white abolitionists".Although the KKK in Texas was less active by the 1870s, lives continued to be taken each year.