After the Civil War, nearly four million slaves in the South were made free. In some states and many counties, freed blacks made up over half the people there. The first Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by Confederate veterans in Tennessee. Ku Klux clan groups were then founded by veterans throughout the South. They wanted to keep African Americans in fear, as they were before the war. This was when lynchings became common. In the 1890s, African American journalist and anti-lynching fighter Ida B. Wells was one of the first people to study lynching cases. She found that black lynching victims were accused of rape or attempted rape about one-third of the time. The most common accusation was murder or attempted murder. Other accusations were verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition, and independence of mind among victims.