I see you spent all of a minute and a half reading that. No wonder you never get anything.
Actually "who were they" is a good question, even if it is still off topic. A side point I neglected.
When we say "Ku Klux Klan" we refer to several incarnations of several organizations, some tightly organized, some just loosely using the name, with purposes ranging from simple joking around with Greek word forms to a kind of moral police force masquerading as a 'social' club, to outright despicable terrorism, murder and destruction.
There are generally three incarnations of KKK; the first, organized by those six soldiers and the war general, was actually one of several vigilante/terrorism groups (e.g. Knights of the White Camelia, founded 1867) created by Confederate ex-soldiers who basically didn't want to accept defeat. In legal terms they maintained a concept of "states rights", an anti-Big Government stance that wanted Northerners out (a sentiment that persists today as a buzzword in the Republican Party, especially but not exclusivey, in the South). Congress and President Grant passed laws in response (Grant virtually drove them out of South Carolina, at least temporarily). This version of the Klan, the original, was dissolved in 1869, although local chapters continued without a national structure for about five more years.
So that Klan had a life of about ten years. By the end of the century it was all but forgotten, although the decades on either side of the turn of that century would manifest the worst racial relations, rioting, lynchings and other persecutions in our nation's entire history, ones which make the 1960s and the Rodney King LA riot look like a sunny day in the park. By then it wasn't the Klan; it was the general population. Read about the
Tulsa race riots and question why they're not in the history books. Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" is built around one of these riots, in Duluth in 1920.
The second Klan was the one organized by Simmons in Georgia (posted last night) directly out of that atmosphere as a "fraternal" organization and chartered by the state, but reaching back to the vigilantism and terrorism practices of the post-Civil war era. This was 1915, the nadir of our shameful racial past, just after, and probably influenced by, the racist D.W. Griffith film
Birth of a Nation. Griffith, tapping on that nadir of American race relations, had invoked the white sheet and burning crosses of a romanticized old England in his film, and Simmons' group incorporated these now-familiar icons along with a manifesto from the original Klan written in 1867. This second Klan milked the paranoias of the time: it was anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionist and antisemitic. Its membership purportedly seeded from the Knights of Mary Phagan, a vigilante group that had lynched Leo Frank in 1915.
Simmons' "fraternal" orgnanization was a small local group for six years until it expanded in 1921. This would be the Klan that spread from the south into the midwest and west, the one that attracted Edward Jackson and Robert Byrd and those other politicians from Colorado and Indiana and California, as well as all over the South. That incarnation peaked in the 1920s, then fell into decline and withered away with World War Two.
The third Klan is a loose gathering of autonomous local groups that sprang up in the 1950s and into the '60s, using the old Klan name but without a central structure. These loosely defined groups were responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of what we call the "civil rights era" including the bombing of the Birmingham church that killed four girls and the triple murder of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner as well as Medgar Evers. More accepted even in the South today as terrorists, this "Klan", however loosely organized, is underground and despised but still exists in some degree.
So when we speak of "who started the KKK" we speak of many different people in at least three different times. Confederate soldiers started the original one, which lasted ten years. A Georgia vigilante started the second one and did damage for two decades. Various community racists locally revived the name for the third one. None of them was a political party.
But seeing as how you've probably devoted your usual seven seconds of reading to all of the above, why not go back to Google Images and pretend to make a point. It's less work than thinking.
which means circle, suggesting a circle or band of brothers.[18]
A new nadir in stupidity.
Hey, at least they spelled the name of the organization right. That's something. 
