By Taylor M. Coffman
Herald Correspondent
95-year old Sanford resident Zillersteen Bellamy has recently made history by being the first person to be awarded an honorary GED from Seminole State College. In May, Bellamy was among those graduating from SSC’s spring courses - and she might have had the longest journey to get there.
Born in 1929, Bellamy, a lifelong Sanford resident, began working at an early age and wore many hats, between helping her mother care for children, cleaning houses, and doing laundry. She was also a student at Hopper Academy, a historic school for Black children, but dropped out after ninth grade to help her parents and support her family. She wasn’t about to let a lack of schooling stop her though; after fourteen years of working in the laundry business, she decided to strike out on her own and start her own laundry business, a process that she elaborated on in a 2024 oral interview with RICHES.
“I had a time of it,” she said. “I was trying to get a small business loan, and at that time there was no such thing for a Black lady, getting a small business loan…I had to go to many different banks, and they turned me down.”
Nevertheless, she preserved, and using some hand-me-down equipment and assistance from the man she’d been working under, Bellamy started Steen’s Dry Cleaners on Sanford Ave., where she remained the owner and operator for twenty years. Her clients included Auto Train, the Sanford Police Department, and the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office.
“I was able to school my children,” she said. “It was hard work, but that was no problem because I was used to hard work. I enjoyed it.”
After selling Steen’s Dry Cleaners in 1986, Bellamy was motivated to get her GED through SSC’s Adult Education program, which would give her the equivalent of a high school diploma. Her decision, she said, was motivated by the way she’d been able to give her own children a better education than she’d gotten, and how she wanted to get herself an education both for herself and for her kids.
Getting her GED would not be without its hurdles, however. Zillersteen Bellamy had been attending classes for nearly a decade when she fell ill, leading her family to become concerned when she couldn’t attend classes anymore. Her son, Raymond, reached out to Edwin Rivadeneyra, Seminole State’s dean of adult education, to see if his mother would be eligible for an honorary GED - an honor that the college had never bestowed before.
After some deliberation between Rivadeneyra, the President of the college - Dr. Georgia Lopez and the state, it was decided that SSC would award Bellamy its first-ever honorary GED in honor of her “extraordinary commitment to lifelong learning, her will to accomplish her goal and her perseverance.”
The decision to award Bellamy her honorary GED was based on the fact that she had successfully run a business for twenty years, with all that entailed, according to her son.
“She had to hire people, train people, make payroll, write checks, balance checkbooks, do taxes, get loans approved, order chemicals, order equipment, wash clothes, press clothes, and manage business contracts,” said Raymond. “And she was able to do all of that with a ninth-grade education.”
On May 2, 2025, Zillersteen Bellamy was awarded an honorary GED, with the 95-year-old accepting her diploma and shaking hands with Dr. Lopez, a huge smile on her face. Her graduation cap, which Raymond had decorated, featured a collage of images from her long life, including one of her standing in front of Steen’s Dry Cleaners, the little laundry business that had made this all possible.
