Robinson, the keynote speaker at the seventh annual Blacks in Diaspora Student Academic Conference, said he thinks one problem with Black History Month is that it only tells a small part of the history of black culture.
"I have always been conflicted with Black History Month," Robinson said. "It represents one-tenth of one percent of a whole of a people's story."
The UNC Institute of African-American Research sponsored the conference, which was held this weekend at the Carolina Inn. The conference included two days of presentations by undergraduate and graduate students from across the nation who are studying the African diaspora -- the dispersal of Africans from their homeland, which began in the 18th century.
Robinson, author of "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," has actively opposed various types of oppression that he said occur in the modern world.
During the American conflict involving Haiti in the early 1990s, Robinson went on a 27-day hunger strike, which nearly killed him, until Clinton took action.
In his speech, Robinson also focused on how he thinks history books ignore black culture prior to the slave trade. "The other problem with Black History Month is that it suggests our history started in slavery," he said.
Robinson said the greatest crime of slavery is that it erased an entire culture's history. He also said that while there are memorials in Washington D.C. for the Holocaust victims and Vietnam casualties, there is not one for slaves.
Another point Robinson brought up was that the amount of prisons in the United States has increased drastically during the past decade.
While the United States only has one-twentieth of the world's population, Robinson cited statistics that it holds 25 percent of the world's prisons. More than three-fourths of the U.S. prison population is either black or Hispanic, he said.
