When Octavius Rowe lost his job as a Boston firefighter in 2018 over controversial social media posts, he accused the city of trampling on his First Amendment rights to free speech.

Rowe also argued that his termination amounted to disparate treatment, citing cases of white firefighters who were never disciplined by the city after posting racist attacks and having run-ins with the law.

The 15-year department veteran — who passed the lieutenant’s promotional exam amid legal proceedings — added on charges that the city was retaliating against him because of his fierce advocacy as vice president of the Black firefighters group, the Boston Society of Vulcans, for hiring more women and people of color to the Boston Fire Department.

Seven years after his dismissal and the termination being upheld by the state Civil Service Commission, Rowe will get a chance to argue his case in a jury trial after a ruling in August that his multimillion-dollar complaint against the City of Boston can move forward.

The Suffolk Superior Court case is likely to further inflame current debates about what constitutes protected speech in an environment where social media posts in response to the recent murder of Charlie Kirk have resulted in numerous firings and suspensions and online rhetoric from both the left and the right has become more extreme.

The case may also highlight hiring practices in the fire department since the end of a hiring consent decree more than 20 years ago. Rowe worked with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights to press Mayor Martin Walsh to hire more firefighters of color. Over 90% of new hires were white during his administration.

Rowe argues that the city’s case against him illegally used concerns over speech to rid the department of a critic. “Rowe was an excellent firefighter with excellent reviews from his superiors,” said his attorney, Robert Johnson. “Our case is about discrimination and retaliation against our client.”

Rowe’s lawyer said the city had no right to pursue termination based on off-duty social media postings on his own accounts.

A pretrial conference is scheduled for early October.

The city, asked to comment on the case, did not respond.

According to his lawsuit, complaints about Rowe began in 2017 after he posted a photograph of himself wearing a sweatshirt with “Caucasians” written under the image of a grinning white man with a dollar sign in place of where a Native American would wear a feather. The image, a parody of the Cleveland Indians logo, was a satirical expression of solidarity with Native Americans who objected to the use of Indigenous figures as sports mascots.

Fire department superiors took action against Rowe when he later posted an image commemorating the 1831 slave revolt in South Carolina led by Nat Turner, who was shown in a caricature holding up a decapitated head.

A subsequent inquiry by a private investigator hired by the fire department turned up postings by Rowe affirming the values of his Nation of Islam faith. According to Johnson, Rowe’s comments backing the primacy of heterosexual relationships between partners of similar ethnicity in no way interfered with his duties as a firefighter. None of his colleagues or superiors offered any evidence of his religious beliefs adversely affecting his job performance, said his attorney.

Moreover, the campaign against Rowe, involving public resources used to scrub his social media accounts, showed how determined the city was to get rid of him, said Johnson, arguing that the investigator never even bothered to interview Rowe while the city never employed similar measures to go after white firefighters who posted objectionable content.

While Rowe was being hounded out of the department, argued his attorney, white firefighters involved in off-duty drunken driving incidents, harm to civilians and using the “n” word in social media postings were not terminated and in many cases not even disciplined.

In one instance cited by Johnson, a white firefighter posted an image of Bill Cosby with a Confederate flag; “F##k everyone who took a knee today,” said another; a picture of President Obama appeared in a post with the message, “Let’s start with this a##hole.”

The absence of action against Rowe’s white colleagues showed that “white firefighters engaged in egregious conduct were allowed to get away with it,” said Johnson, while his client was getting railroaded.